by Tim Parks
Thomas seems to have missed the moment she came in. He wasn’t aware the second symphony was over. They’ve switched to the arias. His girlfriend squeezes his hand. Incredible, though, to have remembered the title of Browning’s poem forty years on. ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’. That is a kind of success. The orchestra strikes up and the singer opens her arms, throws back her head and lets out a note of extraordinary shrillness. This promises to be a different ride, Thomas thinks. Perhaps now at last he can focus on the performance, forget marriage, forget Browning.
Chin lowered, arms by her sides but slowly lifting, the singer pushes out her chest. It’s all very physical; her voice bobs up and down like a boat on stormy waves. It’s true this is another cerebral analogy, but there must be some kind of contact with the music if you can change the image you have of it. Then, on a large white screen above the musicians’ heads, these words appear:
Non san quant’io nel petto
Soffra mortal dolor!
Vieni, Edoardo amato,
O morirò d’amor.
Thomas reads the words and immediately feels differently about the singing. Not that he understands very much, just that it takes on a wordy content. He has no idea what ‘quant’io nel petto’ is all about, but the second line must mean ‘suffers mortal pain’. Or perhaps ‘grief’, or ‘sorrow’. And the last line has to do with dying. Dying of love, no less. Funny that pain rhymes with love in Italian, Thomas reflects, while the singer sings on with a great show of passion, her face glowing. Then a translation fades in to replace the Italian:
No one knows my heart
What mortal pain you suffer!
Come, Edward, beloved,
Or I will die of love.
Of course the rhyme is gone in the English, Thomas notices. But it’s the same with advertising copy. You can’t keep the puns in translation. His wife, he remembers, was always rather brilliant at rhyming and punning; it’s something Thomas misses sometimes, or rather, one of the things that he remembers fondly. Mary would certainly have passed some mocking remark on these words now. She had no time for romantic guff. His girlfriend is listening with a faint smile on her face. Or I’ll die of love, Thomas shakes his head. That’s quite a threat. Not something anyone tried on him, fortunately, though Mary had certainly wept. Well, they both had.
The singer’s voice is reaching a crescendo; her head is thrown right back, her shoulders are shaking. Morirò d’amor, she repeats for the nth time. The ‘or’ shoots up into the rafters, or rather the acoustic panelling. His wife had wept with her face bowed forward, buried in her hands. A very different sound. A sobbing in the guts. At the core. Dear dead women, Thomas suddenly remembers, With such hair, too. The public explodes in applause. They are ecstatic. Thomas too begins to applaud. He is weeping. It’s Browning’s fault. What’s become of all the gold used to hang and brush their bosoms? His girlfriend’s face turns towards him, a wry twist on her lips. She moves her mouth to his ear. Her breath is moist. ‘You’d have thought at least,’ she says, ‘they might have managed to put the right aria on the screen. What a cock-up!’ For a moment Thomas is convinced the voice shrieking ENCORE two or three rows behind is Mary’s.
EVEN TENDERNESS
Being an avid reader in his spare time, Thomas loves to look for his own personal story in novels, and more generally in the lives of literary folk he studied at university. But it’s hard to find a precedent. He didn’t lock his mad wife in the loft like Mr Rochester, or in a mental hospital like T S Eliot. Nor did he auction her off at a Wessex fair like the Mayor of Casterbridge, or have her imprisoned and beheaded like Mantel’s Henry. His story is not Angel Clare’s, repudiating a beautiful girl because she was not what he supposed. But nor was he betrayed by her, as Monsieur Bovary, or Count Karenin, or Gerald in Women in Love. He didn’t chuck the mother of his children out of the house as Dickens did, or Mr Harmon’s father in Our Mutual Friend; he never tried to get between her and the children, never wrote to the press to deem her unworthy. He didn’t let the whole thing just go for ever sourer, only to turn sentimental when she was gone, which was Thomas Hardy’s trick. He isn’t Jude or Jules or Jim. He never slapped her about as Lawrence did Frieda, nor was slapped about as Lawrence was by Frieda. He hadn’t Philip Rothed her, or done a Gilbert Osmond. He didn’t drag her into poverty with his drinking and gambling, as Dostoevsky’s characters might, or propose partner-swapping as Updike’s must. He hadn’t had sex with a maid, like Sam Pepys, or a slave as Old Colonel Sutpen did. He didn’t humiliate her as Shelley did Fanny. Nor did she do any of these things to him. She hadn’t become a nympho like Elsa Morante’s Aracoeli. She hadn’t tried to seduce a son-in-law like Giovanni Verga’s Lupa. He hadn’t asked her to have sex with someone else as Joyce asked Nora. Nor was he ferociously jealous, like Maurice Bendrix, or Othello. No, the more Thomas cast about for comparisons, the more he was bound to reflect that his and his wife’s relationship had followed no literary pattern. It really was their story, and it really had happened. Year after wonderful, difficult year. When this truth finally came home to Thomas in a sharp rush of rude reality it brought with it a new affection for his wife, ex-wife, and a new respect – they really did go through all that together – even tenderness. For a moment or two he thought of phoning, but in the end decided against.
CIRCUMAMBULATION
Every day Thomas walked round his new home in downtown Liverpool, but he could never go into it or take possession. Sometimes he thought back to his old home where Mary now lived with Mark. What a beautiful house that was, with its generous spaces, its garden front and back, its stone fireplace, its views over the valley. He didn’t miss it. Thomas found this not-missing strange. But he really didn’t miss it. Rather he yearned for the home he couldn’t enter. So every morning, after grabbing a coffee in Starbucks, instead of going directly into the office, he took a small detour and walked around the building.
Apparently it had once been a factory, or warehouse, in the days when such buildings could be noble. The facade was brick, with generous windows high above the street and elegant white-stone surrounds. Built about a central courtyard, it occupied almost a whole block – eventually there would be more than a hundred flats – so that to walk around it meant to turn down Hope Street off Canning Street, left on to Rice Street and left again on to Pilgrim Street, thence back to Canning. Thomas’s flat was at the corner of Hope and Rice on the second of four floors. And it was all finished and good to go, complete with the beech parquet he had chosen in sitting room and bedrooms and grey-pink tiles in the two bathrooms. It was shortly after putting in those tiles that the builder in charge of the project failed. The site was closed.
Thomas felt let-down. Worse, this state of affairs seemed to confirm the emotional paralysis his life had sunk into. He saw no way forward. On leaving home three years ago he had rented a modest one-bedroom flat above the main door of a decaying ’60s block inhabited for the most part by pensioners and recently arrived immigrants. I won’t be here long, he thought. For some time then he had been torn between going back to Mary and inviting a girlfriend to move in with him. Weary of his indecision, the girlfriend had withdrawn. Only then did Thomas appreciate that he really could not go home. He felt he would die. So he must make something of his life in Liverpool where his new job was. But what? To make something happen, he had set out to buy a house.
A year passed in that process, a year in which Thomas realised how little his lifetime’s savings were worth in the town centre. He saw flats that were too small, flats that were old and decaying, flats that were too expensive, flats that were too far away from his work. What was the point of coming to live in town if he were in some squalid suburb? There must be somewhere, he thought. Sometimes, in desperation, he emailed Mary and asked for her advice. He sent her links to photos of flats on offer. And very generously she gave her advice, which on these subjects was always astute. ‘No,’ she wrote, ‘this is not the place for you, Tom. It’s too poky for your taste
.’ But however good Mary’s advice, Thomas felt it had been a weakness to ask. He was getting nowhere. He had left home, but he did not have a new home. He was still in a bivouac. He was temporary. He might be forced to return to base at any moment.
Finally, not half a mile from the office, in an area that was, as it were, on the edge of the centre, rundown but maybe on the up, Thomas saw a handsome gentrification project. The following day a Polish girl showed him a roomy flat with high ceilings and gracious windows. This was it. He knew at once. And he had arrived at exactly the right point in the renovation process to choose the flooring and the bathroom tiles. Putting down a large deposit, and signing the papers that would wipe out his savings, Thomas was delighted. He had done something on his own at last, something really adult. The flat would be the hub of a new life. Handover in six months, the developer said. Only days later the banks began to collapse, and in the months that followed the whole economy was sucked down with them. The builder failed, but the developer would not pay back the deposit. This was a brief delay, he had said. Two years ago.
Thomas walked round the building. On the ground floor the huge windows had yet to get their glass. The rain blew in. There was still scaffolding on two sides of the building. His own flat, twenty feet up, was locked and finished and snug, but unattainable. This was the future that was denied him. He had seen a way forward and it had been closed off. Thomas saw a lawyer, the lawyer wrote a letter, the developer did not reply to the letter. But one day the developer phoned Thomas and assured him it was only a matter of time. ‘Even if you sued,’ he said, ‘we couldn’t repay the deposit right now. We don’t have the money. But things will be moving again before the year is out. Hang on.’ Thomas wanted to believe the man was telling the truth, but he felt rather stupid.
Meantime, the situation in the bivouac deteriorated. In itself the flat was not unpleasant; a little gloomy perhaps, the kitchen area poky, the furniture shaky and sad. But the space was sufficient. The heating worked. There was a window over the courtyard, which had a patch of grass and a tree. The problem was noise. Thomas felt hemmed in from all sides. On the floor below, the electric lock on the block’s main door clunked with surprising force. Some malfunction caused it to fire home its bolt four times at intervals of about five seconds whenever someone went in and out. And people went in and out every few minutes. In the middle of the night those clunks were loud enough to wake him. In the basement of the block there was a music rehearsal room. In bed Thomas could hear drums thumping till midnight. Not every evening, but almost. He read late in bed.
Then there were neighbours on three sides. Beyond the sitting room an old couple kept their television on day and night at surprising volumes. They must be deaf. In the flat whose front door opened beside his own, a young couple threatened each other and their children with serious violence on a daily basis. ‘You little liar, I wish I’d never had you!’ ‘Evil bitch! Fuck off!’ Thomas’s own married difficulties began to seem a rather tame affair. What on earth had he been complaining about? But the couple looked cheerful enough when he ran into them on the stairs. On the bedroom side of the flat another elderly tenant was interminably on the phone explaining her ailments and cooking projects to whoever would listen. Her voice boomed.
And still this wasn’t all. In the flat above Thomas’s, a fifty-year-old fellow, who wore cowboy hats and rolled dead cigars between his lips, kept two large Labradors that spent much of their time padding backwards and forwards above his head. Thomas could hear their claws clattering on the floor. True, they did not bark, but there was a Border collie in one of the flats across the courtyard that did. The animal yipped and howled with its paws on a windowsill, frantic that the lazy Labradors wouldn’t reply. In summer, going down the stairs for their walks, the dogs left a carpet of hairs on the steps and in the hallway. Very soon Thomas had a runny nose and rheumy eyes that would not go away and he began to sneeze once, twice, three times in succession. Day in, day out.
Thomas languished. Every morning the porter swept the courtyard with a witch’s brush made of stiff green nylon fibres. Thomas had the impression she was sweeping them directly over his exposed nerves. The woman hailed everyone entering and leaving in a shrill voice. She engaged the postman in interminable conversations right under Thomas’s window. Every month or so a small truck arrived with strimmer and leaf blower and spent an inordinate amount of time sprucing up the handkerchief of lawn. On one of the higher floors above the courtyard a retarded woman shrieked like a peacock at her open window. She shrieked at all hours, or laughed hysterically. Thomas sneezed. Then, irony of ironies, renovation work began on the building immediately beyond the open courtyard. There were piledrivers and pneumatic hammers. Meantime, any work on his own block was a distant memory.
It was not that Thomas risked going insane. He had his earplugs. He had his antihistamines and nasal sprays. He did not think of himself as a victim or an object of compassion. It just seemed incredible that a reasonably successful advertising executive in healthy middle age should be trapped in this sterile, uncomfortable life. He really should make an effort to get his deposit back from the developer and buy elsewhere, or maybe just rent a different place. But the fact that the flat he had bought really was absolutely the right flat for Thomas stymied him. What if he made a move and immediately afterwards building work resumed? How dumb would he feel then?
‘Not long now,’ the developer promised again. He called about every three months. ‘We’re negotiating with the banks, we’re nearly there.’ Thomas enjoyed his morning coffee at Starbucks and walked round the building, before walking on to work. The developer was a liar, he thought. The banks were shot. He remembered reading somewhere that circumambulation was a common feature of magic spells and ancient rituals. You walked round a bride-to-be three times. Or round an icon. You carried a coffin three times round a cemetery. You walked three times around an altar before slaying a firstborn lamb. Soon I will have walked three hundred times round this building, he thought, and still the windows gaped, still the crane was idle, nothing moved.
Then he kissed Elsa. To tell the truth, Thomas had been meaning to kiss Elsa for quite a while now. Unfortunately, it was painfully evident that Elsa had not been meaning to kiss Thomas. One could well understand, given the age difference. Unusually, Thomas had no fantasies about the girl. It was pointless yearning for her in the way he used to yearn for girls, in the way he yearned now for his new flat. Yet he sensed, observing her at work – discussing a conference agenda, for example – that Elsa was a good woman, possibly the right woman – why not use that expression? – should it ever cross her mind to kiss him. Meantime, it was promising that she enjoyed the occasional drink with him on leaving the office in the evening. Less so that afterwards she always had somewhere to hurry off to. Needless to say, there was a boyfriend. ‘We are very stable,’ Elsa said. A strange choice of words. At least I’m not tormenting myself, Thomas had thought.
But one evening it came over him to kiss her anyway and she returned the kiss, and before Thomas knew it the boyfriend had been fired and only weeks later Elsa had moved into his little bivouac and was getting to know the old couple and their booming television and the young couple and their ferocious battles and the old lady and her ailments and recipes, and the retarded woman and her peacock shrieks. Very soon Elsa was wincing in the early morning at the sound of nylon fibres on cement and very soon she too had a runny nose just like Thomas and from time to time her big black eyes ran with tears. She sneezed. And the wonder was they laughed about it and loved each other and loved the bivouac that kept them warm that winter.
At New Year the developer rang and said building work would soon resume. In spring, he said. Now Elsa was beside Thomas as they circumambulated the building after morning coffee. ‘One day it will be ours,’ he said. ‘Yours,’ she corrected him. ‘Ours,’ he insisted. Elsa looked up circumambulation on Wikipedia. ‘Odd,’ she said, ‘that all religious circumambulation around a sacred obje
ct is anticlockwise. And so is ours round the new flat.’ ‘Only because our Starbucks is at the corner of Canning Street and Hope Street,’ Thomas laughed. ‘It wouldn’t make sense to go clockwise if we’re then going on to the office.’ ‘We can call it our Kaaba,’ Elsa suggested. ‘That’s the most circumambulated building in the world, in Mecca.’ ‘Careful you’re not accused of blasphemy,’ Thomas warned her. When he sneezed, she laughed.
In June, the crane began to move. The building would be finished in October, the developer said. But only in November did workers begin to fix the windows on the ground floor. Thomas calculated that he had now walked round the building more than five hundred times. It was a kind of penance, he thought, a purification ritual. ‘Ready in December,’ the developer said. Walking round the building was more exciting now, watching materials arrive and scaffolding come down. Thomas and Elsa went to a furniture warehouse and ordered a kitchen. Thomas was surprised what a pleasure it was to contemplate furniture with Elsa. They took their time, assessing all the choices, bargaining over the price. I am glad the building was delayed, he thought.
Mid-February, the developer said they could move in at Easter. For real, this time. As if he had obviously been joking on previous occasions. On their morning circumambulation Thomas and Elsa were now able to walk in and inspect the courtyard of the renovated building. It really was almost finished. The windows and doors were in place. The crane had been dismantled. Men were laying out the garden. But Thomas shivered. ‘I feel like Moses looking into the Promised Land,’ he said. ‘I’ll be sixty soon.’ ‘Sixty is the new fifty-eight,’ Elsa laughed. ‘And Moses didn’t get to walk round the Promised Land five hundred times.’
