The Fog Garden

by Marion Halligan

  Maybe nobody would be addicted to any opiums if the pain stopped, she thought, but that seemed too romantic a thing to say.

  The morphine also made him constipated. Later that night, when she was wheeling the chair out of the lavatory where he’d spent more than an hour waiting for enemas to work, and they hadn’t, Geoffrey said sadly, The body fails. It’s no good.

  She leaned over the back of his chair and kissed his ear, little butterfly kisses that brought her near his skin, his flesh, his smell that was as sweet as ever. The body isn’t you, she said, it may be behaving badly but inside it you are still you, still you. She breathed the words in his ear and rested her head for a moment against his, only for a moment, even the touch of love is quickly intolerable to the very ill.

  They kissed goodnight, little soft kisses between trembling lips. The oxygen hissed. Odourless, tasteless, coolish, a faint wind. She bent over him, held back all but her lips kissing his, not for too long.

  Kirsten sends a postcard from Aspen. She has met a man and fallen in love. Fancy that. Geoffrey imagines her entertaining him with her jokes. At the bottom of the message in tiny letters, so small he can’t read it even with his glasses, and Clare has to peer up close with her short-sighted eyes, Kirsten has written, no merkins necessary.

  That is because Geoffrey was the first patient she’d met who knew what a merkin was. A pubic wig, he’d said, and Kirsten was impressed. But she didn’t know why such a thing might be necessary, and he could tell her. That venereal disease could make for bald pubes, and so false hair was necessary. Leading to terrible jokes, about merkins lost in public parks, and presented to cardinals as the pope’s beard. Even constructing them into false vaginas. Kirsten was charmed with so much information.

  Thought you must have had one, she murmured, even Kirsten couldn’t say this in her usual cheerful loud voice. So gorgeous. All those red curls.

  The hair on his head was that colour once, said Clare. Before it faded to this pale buttery yellow; I envy it, it’s like being a blonde.

  Clare couldn’t quite believe they were having this conversation. Geoffrey smiled and blushed.

  False vaginas, said Kirsten, how do you mean?

  In the absence of a real one. You’d use a merkin and a bag of cotton wool, or some such. Same principle as those blow-up dolls, which I believe you can spend a fortune on in certain sex shops. The merkin, of course, a kind of synecdoche, the part for the whole.

  Clare gets this joke, which is a bit erudite for Kirsten. She wonders what she will do when Geoffrey is no longer here to tell her things, how she will cope without his vast store of odd facts. His wit. His black irony. And who will translate bits of Latin for her?

  When Geoffrey died it seemed as though Clare had given him permission. Not directly, but saying to her daughter, I wish he could go to sleep and not wake up. It was the first time she had formulated the thought in the present, always it had been, not yet, not yet. And her wish was what Geoffrey did. She kissed him goodbye at seven o’clock, at nine-thirty he was sleeping peacefully, by ten, still in that same deep sleep, he had died.

  At just after seven she had made her wish, because she thought he had struggled enough, that it was just too hard for him to keep on breathing. And she was afraid that his death would be a terrible long agonised drowning in the tumours that were invading his lungs, that was what she was wishing against. She was grateful for that gentle slipping away. The night before he had asked to keep his bedroom curtains open so he could see the meteorite shower but it turned out to be too cloudy. The evening of his death he’d drunk two glasses of Fleuri, his favourite wine by that time, for its mildness and delicacy. She’d tasted it faintly winy on the sweetness of his breath when she’d kissed him.

  She went back to the hospital in a taxi. His skin felt cool, like himself, not as it did later, in the mortuary chapel, cold and ice-hard. She stayed for several hours, talking to him, touching, kissing his cheeks, holding his hands. She found the nail scissors in his sponge bag and cut off some strands of the red-gold hair to keep.

  She discovered that the long rehearsal for grief of his dying was no preparation for the real thing. Practice hadn’t helped. Geoffrey’s affairs were neat, not complicated, no debts, but she was astonished at how pioneering she needed to be to settle them. It was as though nobody had ever died before, and the whole process had to be rediscovered, perhaps invented. Eventually it was done, and she thought, this is the beginning of my new life. She’d tried out the word widow in her mouth a few times; the taste was strange, not bitter or sour exactly, more mysterious. Of course not sweet; perhaps salty? And it was very very large. Needing a lot of chewing on and sucking at before she could know its flavour.

  She did register the fact that she was on her own now for the first time in thirty-five years. On her own. She could say free. Not her own choice, but the word was there. So was adventure.

  She got invited out to dinner a lot and never took her car because she liked to drink wine. When after one of these dinners an old friend put his arms around her, one warm April night giving her a hug goodbye, after dinner, and she put her arms around him, hugging him back, a lot of her friends gave her hugs these days, and she knew she needed them, her loose shirt slid away and his hands touched the skin of her back. The others were in the garden smelling the heavy night scent of the mandevilla, she could hear their voices talking about how heady it was, almost too heavy, and she stood longer in the hug than was simply friendly, perhaps, she wasn’t sure; she was too busy feeling the way that his touch had got into her blood and was flowing all around her body.

  Of course you realise Clare that men your age prefer younger women. So says her friend Thea. Young women, in fact. Statistically speaking, it is very unlikely you will find another partner. There’s more chance of you getting electrocuted in the bath.

  She doesn’t want another partner. She’s had one, a lovely one, for thirty-five years. You don’t expect or need to repeat that in a lifetime.

  But her body would like someone to make love to it.

  Well, I’ll just have to take up with younger men, won’t I, she says defiantly to Thea. Young men.

  The thing about writers is that they put everything that happens to them into words. Sooner or later. Sometimes they write them down, sometimes they make stories out of them, sometimes they are too hard to deal with now and have to be put away till later. Sometimes the happenings are a long puzzle that no solutions seem to fit. And sometimes they need to be invented.

  She could think of a lot of words for this sense of a man’s touch flowing through her body. They all sounded straight out of a Mills and Boon novel. Surging. Pulsing. Overwhelming. Electrifying. She laughed sarcastically at herself. Evidently Mills and Boon are getting it right. Electrifying. Forsooth.

  Electrifying gave her a picture of Frankenstein’s monster. Mary Shelley’s monster. Wired up and plugged into a storm, so the lightning could zap him into life. It was always seen as so violent and jagged an act, but perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps it was gentle and powerful and full of pleasure. Frankenstein, a Genevan student of natural philosophy, learns the secret of imparting life to inanimate matter . . . she is beginning to see that her matter has been inanimate for a long while.

  Now she finds herself thinking of sex all the time. She is still full of grief, but these thoughts of sex have become an extension of her grief, this sharp unfocused desire that suffuses her blood and makes her juices run; she had forgotten what puddles are possible. Once she hunkers down to get a book from the bottom shelf and drips on the floor; she laughs, it’s funny, but she is delighted too. Dry vaginas are another of Thea’s stark warnings.

  And so the writer sits at her desk early one cold autumn morning (minus four, already!) wrapped in a rug of small Afghan squares, pink and blue, white and pale lemon; Geoffrey used to wear it and it smells of him. The golden elm outside the window is still entirely green, but the Manchurian pears that inhabit this suburb have reached their ful
l dazzle of vermilion. The Manchurian pears are always the first. Later, if the sun shines, she will drive past several she knows, for already their leaves are beginning to fall, their quiver and dazzle of brilliant colour is slowly dropping away into piles of browning litter on the grass, blowing and crushed on the asphalt road. It’s important to look at them before it’s too late.

  And so the writer sits, and writes about Manchurian pear trees, but in fact she is choosing where her narrative will take her next. Or perhaps she is letting the narrative choose . . .

  Bodies on a bed, who have breathlessly but slowly stripped one another of clothes, whose hands have rubbed silk knickers against smooth skin, have stroked breasts offering themselves cupped in black lace (the kind they called jelly-on-a-plate bras when they were teenagers) and now naked are endeavouring to consume one another. Straining, pulling together, apart. He kisses her breasts, his tongue flicks around her nipple and she takes off into a flight of orgasms like a flock of birds. He is kissing and licking. Her stomach and armpits and ribs. His mouth is between her legs, his tongue . . .

  She has always believed in writing sex scenes that aren’t explicit, so readers can use their own imaginations, offering a delicate kind of literary foreplay that they can take to their own erotic conclusions. Oh, but his tongue . . . her back arches, and she takes off in another flight of orgasms.

  When he comes between her breasts she smooths it into her skin with languid fingers. Geoffrey always said it’s good for the skin, she tells him. Well, he says, we better keep it up, and they giggle, and lie together, sticky and slightly squelchy, making patterns with their fingers on one another’s skin, he runs his nails furrowing into her flesh but she has been careful not to mark him, there is no explanation for the reddish tracks of passion down a husband’s back. And safe in this happy enfolding of a man’s arms for a little while she talks to him of Geoffrey. She tells him how sex with him feeds into her grief for Geoffrey, nourishing it, soothing it, she has always known that sex and death are a powerful combination but hadn’t thought that death could feed into sex like this.

  Le petit mort and le grand, he says.

  It is a kind of dying, this abandonment. This is adultery, which she has never practised but has imagined often enough. A lot of the characters in her books commit adultery. She has always enjoyed imagining it for them. And guilt? My grief needs this, she says to herself. It is comfort, that is all. There isn’t any betrayal.

  They teach themselves to talk at the same time as kissing.

  She says to him: What if you fall in love with me?

  His role is the seducer’s. Is it necessary to sound warnings? She is the mistress, not the good woman of thirty-five years standing.

  I won’t, he says. I love you, I have loved you a long time, you are my dear friend. But I won’t fall in love with you. We aren’t twenty any more.

  She knows this is true, about falling in love with her, and is glad of it, though some wicked little slitty bit of her would like it not to be, would like a mad bad dangerous grand passion to storm into their lives and not care what damage happened around it, but she is mainly glad that they are too old and full of consequences to let it happen.

  If we could do this whenever we liked, she says, we probably wouldn’t. Hardly ever. If we were married, or partners in the eyes of the world, we’d probably go to a concert, or something.

  It is because it is illicit. It is adultery, not marriage.

  And shouldn’t try to become marriage. Should stay adultery and illicit and stop soon.

  Not yet.

  And so they lie together, on more than one occasion, not too often, and she takes off in flocks of orgasms, and he tells her she is the sexiest person he has ever met, and she is pleased, she who believed the heyday in her blood was cold. Ah, she was mistaken. But needed to be, to survive. Then.

  They talk about marriage. You get married when you are twenty, he says, and it’s a matter of compromise. But you have to be careful that you compromise with integrity, that you don’t fake it.

  Faking compromise. It’s a nice idea. Subtle. He is a subtle man.

  Marriage is a construction, she says, over the years, you both make it. It’s complicated, and you have to see what a structure you’ve built. Look after it, value it.

  But sometimes it is just that structure that gets in the way of people simply being.

  The thing about couples, he says, is that they become complacent. That’s dangerous.

  She plays Alfred Deller, his dark deep counter-tenor singing, Ah love is handsome, and love is kind . . .

  You mean fat and happy and comfortable, she says. Growing plump on pleasing one another.

  She is getting thinner now she has lost Geoffrey. She thinks how pleased he would be with this slimmer self.

  But maybe in growing plump on pleasing you aren’t any more the person you were, he says.

  The wife isn’t the wench she was, you mean.

  He sighs.

  Ah, she says, we are none of us the people we were. Not you, not me. Not your wife. Certainly not Geoffrey. We have all changed. We change one another. And isn’t it mostly a good thing? Or anyway a necessary one. I’m not twenty-two with waist-length hair and ignorant, or anyway innocent and with everything to find out. Thank god.

  They turn from the pleasures of conversation to the pleasures of sex. She lies back and lets his mouth cover her body with its nips and tingles of lust until she is driven wild by it. I like the way you don’t stop even when you’ve come, she says, and they clutch one another in laughter. And then they go back to talking about marriage, which is proving to be a topic of great fascination to them both.

  Anyway, he says, we wouldn’t be any good at living together. We’re both too fond of setting our own agendas.

  She wonders about this. People thought she set the agenda in her and Geoffrey’s life, but did she? Maybe in certain things, houses, holidays. But she did what he wanted, she was a faithful wife through all their years together, he had his way. She set out to please him.

  Power in marriage isn’t always obvious, she says. It’s like outsiders never knowing what makes a marriage tick. Often the quiet one is in control, the noisy one zips and zaps about but the quiet one is the strong one.

  I was fairly noisy, he says, but they were pretty much my agendas that we followed.

  She knows what Geoffrey would say. He would say, all this talk of power. Disdainful. Marriage is about partners, sometimes one is strong, sometimes the other. Power isn’t what marriage is about, not good marriage. She thinks of her present feverish behaviour. Geoffrey saved her from that. Calmly, and dismissively sometimes, comfortingly, he saved her from barbs, from unkindnesses, attacks. He was the still point of her life to which she always returned. She needs to find another one. Invent another one.

  She has another question. What about love, she asks. You know, how it is said that there is one person who loves more than the other; one who loves, one who is loved.

  He doesn’t know. Is it a question you can ask, he wonders.

  It is the kind of question that gets asked in not very good novels, she says.

  Maybe my wife would think she had loved me more than I loved her. But I don’t know that it would be true.

  She has at moments thought the same; that she loved Geoffrey more than he loved her. Maybe all wives think so.

  How can you measure love like that, he asks.

  Sounds like a song, she says.

  Maybe it’s like a cistern, she says. It fills and empties. It’s all flux. The Greeks thought so. Life is made of flux. Very juicy.

  His fingers . . . she can’t write it down.

  Eventually she comes back to this. Maybe your wife doesn’t know how much you love her, she says.

  No, that’s probably true. I’m not good at telling her.

  You know that?

  Yes, but it doesn’t mean I can do anything about it.

  They talk on like this endlessly. In bed. On the
phone. Over coffee, and glasses of wine. In company, and out. There is so much to be said. So much to be understood.

  What I like about you, she says, is that you haven’t come to the end of yourself. You aren’t finished. You can still learn. Change.

  Maybe I shall learn to be a good husband.

  Why not? It could be a kind of courtship of his wife, all over again. It will be more difficult than the first time, because of all the constructed past behind them. But she thinks he might succeed, that he will put his energy and his love into this second wooing and make it happen. She is not jealous, she admires it, wishes it well. It is nothing to do with what they are up to, here on this bed. That is marriage. This is adultery, illicit, doomed but not yet. This hours of pleasuring another body is the sort of thing you don’t often do when you are married. At the beginning of course, and afterwards on high days and holy days, but married lives have mostly got too many interesting things in them to want to spend a whole afternoon smearing one another with bodily fluids. Witness these conversations, they are about marriage, their marriages to other people, not this adultery. Adultery which she has never practised, but has written about, often enough.

  It functions on an absence of history, a lack of commitment. These hours now. Baisers volés, sings Charles Trenet. It is not just the kisses that are stolen, it is little snatches of another life, that will have to be given back. And in her case, the nourishing of grief. It is Geoffrey’s death that she is exploring, through her abandonment to pleasure.

  Geoffrey is what she thinks about, all the time. It seems to her that he gave her permission to go back to her sensual self, encouraged her to do so. Saying at the dinner party: we used to make love five times a night. Telling the story of their first meeting to their children. How he sat next to her at lunch in the university hall of residence. How she was wearing very small shorts (it was the summer, out of term) and her hair in a long plait. Why did she interest him? Because she was so sexy, of course. Of course. Oh, he liked her mind, her conversation. But what made him come and sit beside her that very first time at the long hall dining table was her sexiness.