by Tim Parks
The occasion of his visit today was the sale of the flat that had once served as his office. Both signatures were required. They had decided to meet beforehand at the house to discuss the division of the furniture. In the past Thomas would have had his car waiting at the station, or Mary would have come to pick him up, or one of the children when they were old enough. Or at a push he would have taken a bus. But now the weather was sweltering and he felt impatient. On impulse he went to the taxi stand, which would cost him £45. ‘I can barely afford one Mrs P,’ he remembered joking years ago, ‘never mind two.’
‘I guess it will have to wait till you’re chairman of the board,’ she laughed.
‘Just after the bend, on the right,’ Thomas told the driver and was overwhelmed by the thought that what he should have said was that he loved her and that all this talk of a second Mrs P was nonsense and she should never mention the idea again. You should have forbidden her from ever bringing up the idea at all, Thomas thought, climbing out of the cab. That would have reassured her. Instead you fooled around, and so confirmed her suspicion. What could she do in response but start to disinvest in the relationship? Which in turn would prompt him to feel that something was badly wrong and that he had better prepare for the worst. You made a terrible mistake, Thomas thought. Despite the heat he was in a cold sweat. Worse than a mistake, a crime. Destroying a family. Thomas gave the taxi driver a large tip.
Beyond the wicket gate the familiar garden was in full bloom. Roses flamed over the front windows. The lawn was the brilliant green that betrays a chemical fertiliser. But Thomas was surprised to see the French window closed. Why? Both Mary and their daughter Sally loved to sit in the breeze by the open window. It was such a fine spring day.
Thomas put his nose against the glass, but the room was empty. And had changed, he thought. Perhaps some piece of furniture had been moved. Or a picture. He couldn’t quite see what.
Going round the side of the house he reflected that Mary had not had any trouble replacing his gardening skills. Both jasmine and wisteria were very neatly tied up. Suddenly he was struck by a strange silence hanging about the place. Everything was perfect, but very still, as in a photograph, or a film set before the actors arrive. Or after they have gone, perhaps. He pushed the doorbell. Even through the heavy door the ring was loud.
Immediately there was a response. But it came from the garden behind him, behind the jasmine. A dog whined. Thomas had always hated this dog, a Dobermann, which was left out all night in the next yard and often barked. What was its name? He couldn’t remember. Meanwhile there was no sign of movement in the house. This was irritating. He rang the bell again. Again the dog whined. It scratched at the fence. The sounds only made the stillness heavier. She will be in the bathroom, Thomas thought. Mark must be out. Though actually he was a little late for lunch and Mary had assured him Mark would be there, otherwise he wouldn’t have accepted the invitation. He would never have agreed to have lunch with Mary on her own.
Waiting, he turned to look over the fence at the dog he hated. Why, he wondered, had Mary got rid of her dog, Ricky, shortly after they had separated? It was strange. Just when you thought she would have been grateful for the company of the animal she got rid of him. Life was mysterious. Thomas looked over the fence at the Dobermann and remembered its name was Rocky. Rocky and Ricky. He’d never noticed that the names were so similar. Such close neighbours. Seeing the face appear over the jasmine, Rocky barked loudly and ran around his stump of a tail in excitement. The bark echoed painfully between the two houses. Thomas hated it, but nevertheless felt a certain affection for the dog, seeing it after so long. For its doggie nervousness, its disquiet.
But why was no one answering the door? It wasn’t like her. He was nervous too. Listening to the bell respond to his finger for the third time, Thomas suddenly realised what had happened. She had killed herself.
The film set – for the whole thing has taken on an eerie theatricality now – comes complete with a glass-paned lean-to against the wall by the front door. This narrow shed is a clutter of garden tools. Tracked by a camera overhead, Thomas moves swiftly towards it. He untwists a wire that keeps the latch on its hook and steps inside among spades and garden forks and crusty old work boots. Now there is a close-up of his staring eyes as he rummages through old flowerpots on the shelves. Where have they left it? Cobwebs stick to his fingers. Then he has the spare key.
She has hanged herself. She knew he was coming. She knew he would be the one to find her. Aware of the camera focusing on his trembling hand as he tries to push the key into the lock, he knows these are moments he will remember for ever. The lock turns. Inside, the silent perfection of the place convinces him that an awful revelation is at hand. Rocky has stopped barking. The stillness is uncanny. Mark too? he thinks, as the camera tracks round the empty room. Please God, no. The piano is where he left it four years ago. The chairs, the shelves, are all where he left them. There is no blood on the floor. ‘Mary?’ he calls. His voice in the overhead mike is courageously firm. ‘Mark?’ He turns left to the kitchen. It is neat and clean. There is no sign of cooking. They never meant to eat.
Thomas raises his voice. ‘Mary!’ Later he will recall how extraordinarily aware of his body and posture he was as he started to climb the stairs, tensed for nightmare. Each turn of the staircase – and there are three floors – takes a year off his life as a new part of the old house falls into his field of vision. Nothing. Nothing at the first turn, nothing at the second. But then, how could they have hanged themselves here, when there is no place in the ceiling to attach a rope? No banister to dangle from.
The bathtub scarlet with blood. He pushes the toilet door, ready to vomit. A bright beam of sunlight glistens on the white enamel. Mark’s room, then. Another door to push. It’s a shocking mess, but that in itself is hardly a shock. On the contrary. The camera behind his left shoulder now, Thomas gazes at piles of clothes overflowing from an open cupboard, papers everywhere, the computer on the floor where he always puts it when he sits with his back to the bed. Seventeen years ago Thomas had sat in that very spot singing a tiny child to sleep. Now he is in a cold sweat.
To the right the small guest room waits with dusty patience for guests. This is where Thomas slept when he could no longer bear the conjugal bed. A guest in his own house. But why is he wasting time here? He slams the door shut, very aware that he has merely been putting off the only two rooms that matter, the only rooms with rafters.
The camera holds his anxious face as he pauses on the landing. Thomas looks into the lens. Eyes and camera seem to be questioning one another. What is all this about? Decisively he moves to his daughter’s old room, long empty at the back of the house where the roof comes down low and the ceiling is wooden slats with one large beam near the outer wall. Thomas pushes the door determinedly. Nothing. The room is breathlessly still. Except, moving into the middle, Thomas catches the movement of his own body in the floor-to-ceiling mirror his daughter once asked for so she could watch herself dancing. The very emptiness of the place seems to demand her ghost.
So it must be in their own bedroom, under the roof up the last flight of stairs, that she has done it. But you knew that, Thomas realises. Where else? In the sanctum of their withered intimacy. The camera knows it too, turning before he does to track along the passageway.
‘Mary!’
The house is drawing him upwards. Everything else has been a diversion, or a preparation. The scene is set. In confirmation, the camera fuses with his eyes, his point of view. They will discover the slaughter together. Her feet, swinging from the big central beam on which the roof rested, dangling over the bed where love had been made countless times, where Mark himself was conceived.
Tom!’ a voice called. ‘Is that you, To-om?’
Thomas closed his eyes and sighed deeply. The call came from behind and below him.
‘Really not smart,’ Mary was shaking her head as he reached the bottom stair. ‘Leaving the front door wide
open. With all the stray cats around here. Not to mention the cat burglars!’
Mark went to his father and they hugged.
‘What were you doing in my bedroom? I’d prefer it if you didn’t go up there without asking.’
‘You’re sweating, Dad,’ Mark stepped back. ‘God, you’re soaked. Let me give you some deodorant.’ Laughing, the boy pulled his father into the downstairs toilet and began to spray something icy cold into his damp armpits.
As he came out, Mary unleashed a wry smile.
‘Alone still? I half thought we might have to provide luncheon for the second Mrs P.’
Turning to the kitchen, she began to open a big pack of sushi. She hadn’t felt like cooking.
‘I’ve decided to skip the second Mrs P,’ Thomas found himself on automatic pilot, ‘and go straight for number three, or even four.’
Mary laughed good-heartedly.
For a moment then it was hard to tell which of those two old stories of their marriage they were presently in.
SHRINK
Thomas was furious with his shrink and finally found the courage to tell her as much. Perhaps three weeks without analysis over the long Christmas break had given him the chance to get his head together and reassert his independence.
‘The fact is,’ he began, ‘if it hadn’t been for you, I wouldn’t have left my wife. I would still have a home and family and an identity that made sense to me. Not to mention the financial side of it all.’
Made worse, of course, he might have added, by these £90-an-hour sessions.
His shrink is a small squat woman in her mid-seventies who shuffles around a stone floor in slippers, smoking ultra-thin menthol cigarettes. She has never asked Thomas’s leave to smoke during his visits, which, given that this is theoretically a place of work, is quite possibly illegal, he reflects, and certainly disrespectful. On the other hand he hasn’t asked her not to smoke. She exercises a strange power over him that Thomas is beginning to find rather irksome.
The shrink got up to look for a shawl. She must be cold. Now she sits again and taps away a little ash. Looking up, her raised eyebrows seem to say, Go on, then.
‘I came to you in a dilemma over my marriage; you took the decision for me after only two or three meetings. From everything that’s emerged in our conversations since, and that’s nearly eighteen months’ worth, it’s become clear that you are viscerally opposed to marriage in general, above all long marriages. No doubt you tell all your clients to leave their husbands or wives. Basically my whole life has been radically and negatively transformed just because in a moment of weakness I took a friend’s advice and came to the wrong shrink.’
The shrink draws on her cigarette and pulls the brown shawl tight round her shoulders.
‘How was your Christmas, Mr Paige?’ she asks. ‘And New Year. Did you go away?’
‘No. I was here in town. My girlfriend went back to her family. In Dublin.’
The shrink waited.
‘In the end I took advantage of the situation to get a lot of work squared away so there’ll be more free time when she gets back.’
Again the shrink did not speak. When Thomas did not continue she simply settled back in her chair as if to make herself comfortable. She appeared, Thomas thought, to be observing him carefully, even sympathetically; on the other hand he had long since realised this must be any shrink’s default setting. Well, he wasn’t going to oblige, he decided. He could stay silent as long as she could. Already he was thinking that at the end of this hour he would very likely discontinue their relationship. But as soon as his posture began to assume a hint of defiance, she enquired:
‘Was this the first Christmas you’ve spent away from your family?’
Thomas reflected: ‘The second.’
Again she made her encouraging face; again he hesitated; again as soon as it seemed he might stay defiantly mute she had a question ready.
‘What stopped you from getting in the car and driving over there?’
Thomas too was in an armchair, still in his overcoat. It wasn’t clear to him whether the question came from genuine interest or a desire to provoke; he decided to take it for the latter.
‘That would have been a big decision,’ he said, ‘precisely thanks to all the drastic steps I’ve taken this year.’
He didn’t say, under your influence, but felt he could trust her to read the accusation in his voice.
The shrink grinned and sucked the last wisdom from her cigarette. She leaned forward and stubbed it out carefully. The ashtray was clean because, as Thomas had noted some time ago, she always emptied it before the next client and opened the window for a few minutes, which was perhaps why she had felt cold. Outside it was raining on slushy snow.
She waited.
‘It would hardly have been fair on Elsa,’ Thomas added, almost involuntarily. It annoyed him that he tended to throw more into the conversation than was perhaps necessary. Sometimes the whole hour was pretty much his own monologue. Which was rather letting her off the hook, he thought. My motormouth making her money. On the other hand, he was there to be analysed, not to keep things hidden. In the end, the whole quandary boiled down to the question: was she friend or foe? And if foe, why on earth was he paying her to fight him? Suddenly he felt he must solve this question today.
‘Sometimes,’ he announced, ‘I feel that if my wife were ever to find out the kind of advice you’ve been giving me, she’d take you to court for destroying our marriage.’
The shrink did at least seem very attentive now, which was gratifying.
Thomas waited. He would decide this very day if it made any sense at all going on with this farce.
‘Tell me about Christmas in the family,’ the shrink said.
Thomas sighed.
‘I always wanted a traditional English Christmas,’ he told her.
She made her encouraging face.
‘I mean, having a tree. As big as possible. With fairy lights. A turkey lunch. Plum pudding. Exchanging presents on Christmas Day itself. Seeing them under the tree on the days beforehand. We used to have lunch, which was pretty heavy, with quite a lot of wine, something special and expensive, open our presents together sitting round a fire, then collapse into bed or go for a walk.’
‘Sounds idyllic,’ the shrink laughed. ‘I can’t see why you didn’t drive home, then.’
Thomas felt angry.
‘Obviously it wasn’t quite like that. Or, it was like that, but it didn’t feel as it should have felt. Or as I always hoped it would feel.’
The shrink proffered her questioning, knitted-brow look. Sometimes it seemed she worked more with facial expressions than with words.
Thomas tried to focus on Christmas. For some reason he found himself saying, ‘The ghost of Christmases past.’
The shrink ignored the allusion.
‘Actually it was all very tense. First Mary didn’t want the tree because it dirtied the floor with its needles. She didn’t want the turkey because she didn’t feel like cooking it. She didn’t want to wait for Christmas Day to exchange presents because why not use things once they’d been bought? Very likely she was right and it was stupid of me to insist. I think she thought we were doing things too much the way my family had always done them, while her family had never really had a Christmas tradition. It didn’t seem they really did anything at all at Christmas. It was all Hogmanay with them. Being Scottish. Glaswegians, even. The children loved it, though. When I said, Okay, I give in, not this year then, they’d start clamouring for the tree and the turkey and so on, and then Mary changed her mind and we did it anyway, but with a feeling that it had all been quite an effort to get to that decision.’
The shrink nodded.
‘Probably it was my fault. Probably I shouldn’t have suggested anything at all.’
The shrink pulled out a face that seemed to mean: how depressing, but there you go.
‘Then it would have been up to her to suggest what to do and she would have felt
more in control and positive about it all.’
The shrink frowned. ‘Your wife wasn’t working at this time?’
‘Freelance jobs. Now and then.’
The shrink waited.
‘I remember one time she called in the decorators between Christmas and New Year.’
Here the shrink raised her eyebrows, as one both surprised and amused. It was the most spontaneous of her expressions so far.
‘Tell me,’ she said, feeling down the side of her armchair for her cigarettes. Thomas was aware of a sudden reciprocal warmth between them. He was rather good at telling stories and she was an attentive listener. He tried to remember.
‘I had invited my mother up that year. Or rather, we had invited her. I would never have invited my mother for Christmas, or anyone else for that matter, if Mary hadn’t agreed. Maybe it was even Mary who suggested it. I can’t remember. Actually, they got on pretty well. Mary was generous with guests, she put on a big show for them, but then she’d get impatient, especially if the stay was extended. It was also the first year of the dog. He was still a puppy.’
‘Ricky,’ the shrink said.
Thomas smiled. If there was one aspect of the shrink’s performance you couldn’t fault her on it was her memory. Gradually she was becoming a repository of his entire life. Often he wondered how she could do that for all her clients, the same way he wondered how pianists could recall all the pieces they played. No doubt it was this that gave her her hold over him. She did not forget. She possessed his life.
‘That’s right. Ricky.’
‘The trophy dog,’ the shrink added. She was rubbing it in, but he could hardly deny these had been his words.
‘That wasn’t a problem,’ he said quickly, ‘since my mother always loved dogs. We always had one when I was a kid.’
The shrink waited.
‘Anyway, the house needed redecorating. Or rather the walls needed repapering. My wife liked them to be smart and fresh. I wasn’t too concerned myself. Probably I’m a bit lax that way. I think men and women differ over stuff like that. She had waited till the children were pretty much grown-up and had stopped putting fingerprints on the wall. Anyway, she managed to get a cheap price from a couple of guys who worked for a decorating firm. They would do it over Christmas with the firm’s equipment, but moonlighting and paid under the table.’
