To Heaven by Water

by Justin Cartwright

  Rosalie has decorated the walls which enclose their garden with Moroccan lamps, which she now switches on, so that the little garden is romantically lit – theatrically lit – through the fretwork of the lamps, which were once used in a production of Carmen. Rosalie kisses him: the vinous interiors of their mouths, the warm viscous wetness of their saliva, become one and he feels calm again, as if by turning on the lights Rosalie has caused everything to change. He thinks of Darcey Bussell en pointe in Das Lied von der Erde as he puts his arms around her hips – she is still standing – and he feels reassured by holding them and pressing his face to her flat – reprovingly flat – stomach.

  ‘It will be all right, won’t it?’ she says. ‘Do you promise me?’

  ‘I promise, darling.’

  ‘You know I get anxious. I’m sorry. I say stupid things.’

  ‘You don’t have to apologise. Neither of us does.’

  It’s strange to him that this little intimacy, this kiss and the feel of her hips, should suddenly put the doubts to flight. Now he feels guilty for his secret fears about all those ballet exercises and their effect on her hormones. When Mum died, he wondered how much Dad had loved her after thirty-eight years; recently he has been wondering if you can sustain love in marriage for ever. Rosalie thinks Dad has a girlfriend, but Ed doubts it. Whatever his reasons for becoming so thin and wearing the African bangles his brother sent him on his wrists, it’s nothing to do with wanting to have a girlfriend. Ed thinks – he has intimations already – that marriage can impose a sort of heaviness that never lifts, a sort of muting of the senses, and perhaps this has lifted in Dad’s case.

  When he had lunch with him a couple of weeks ago, he asked Dad if he was happy.

  ‘Everyone asks me that.’

  ‘It’s a natural enough question.’

  ‘Ed, the happiest I have ever been was in Rome in 1966.’

  ‘Oh, you and Richard and Liz.’

  ‘Yes, me and Dickie and Liz, and Adam, of course.’

  ‘And Mum?’

  ‘What about your mother?’

  ‘Do you miss her?’

  ‘Darling, of course I miss her. I miss her terribly. One thing I think you should know, in case you haven’t guessed it, is that, like most people who have been married for years, we weren’t what somebody of your age would think of as in love.’

  He emphasised the last two words and gave them a slight country-and-western edge – in lurve – which Ed found irritating. But of course it’s a habit he has inherited, and perhaps a lot more, too. They were sitting in the covered courtyard of the British Museum, Dad in a T-shirt and jeans with his Masai or whatever bracelets, and Ed in his lawyer’s suit, as though they had changed roles. Dad may have dressed deliberately in this way for their lunch date.

  ‘How’s Rosalie?’ Dad asked, perhaps switching the attack. He had told his father that they were – awkward phrase – trying for a baby.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘No luck?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘It’ll happen, trust me.’

  ‘Jesus, you’ve really become a bit of a hippy guru, haven’t you, with your T-shirt and bracelets? As well as being the oldest gap-year student in the world, you’ve become an amateur gynaecologist.’

  ‘And you think, Ed, that it is somehow related to Mum’s death?’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘In a way it is. But not in any way you would understand.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘It’s not really explicable.’

  ‘You’ve had your teeth whitened.’

  ‘It’s part of my retirement deal. Yearly whitening. What are you accusing me of, Ed? Insufficient grief? Lack of dignity? Inappropriately glowing teeth?’

  ‘No, just that you look like a bit of a twat.’

  ‘You’re saying I’m embarrassing?’

  ‘A little.’

  They laughed. Dad was suddenly caught in the grid created as the sun fell on the glass roof above; the whole courtyard was divided geometrically into celestial graph paper. His face was instantly more deeply furrowed, demonstrating that the weight-loss came with a retributive cost.

  ‘But you’re OK, aren’t you? You’re so thin.’

  ‘When you were a little boy you used to worry I was going to kick the bucket or be shot or kidnapped. The irony, the cruel irony, actually, is that everyone, including me, thought your mum would go on for ever. But, yes, I’m fine. And believe me, I am deeply touched that you worry about me.’

  ‘That’s OK then. Got to go now, Dad. Take care.’

  ‘And you.’

  Last night at the ballet, Dad seemed to have entered a trance. He leaned towards the stage – a long way off – every time Darcey Bussell appeared. His features were in close sympathy with what was going on, as if he could extract meaning from every moment and every step. It was surprising.

  Ed lets go of Rosalie, and removes his cheek from her stomach. Maybe she thinks he has been listening out for developments. As he looks up, he sees the bougainvillea in its death throes, which have gone on for six months. Although Rosalie warned him it could never grow here, he decided that with huge doses of fertiliser it might triumph. It became a minor battle of wills, which he has lost. It has only one coppery flower. It is a reproach to him but he’s resisting the temptation to see something symbolic about its condition.

  ‘Did you hear anything down there?’

  Rosalie, half drunk, is cheerful again.

  ‘I thought I heard the pitter-patter of tiny feet. But perhaps it was your blood going round.’

  ‘Or my lunch.’

  ‘Yes, it could have been that.’

  He’s always found her stomach and the hinterland lying between her slim hips erotic. It’s the confluence of everything sexual. It’s an odd thing: his sexual desire is urged on by small details – the way, for instance, Rosalie’s long strong legs form a little delta as they join her hips, which creates a crease when she sits. Now, under the snake-charmer light and shadow, which is given movement by a light breeze in the moribund bougainvillea, she pulls up her skirt and sits astride him. He takes his cock out, and, easily bypassing her panties, he enters her.

  ‘I’m going for twins,’ he says, feeling his face congested – it may not be visible from the outside – with a strange mixture of regret, lust and happiness.

  ‘Why stop at twins?’

  ‘It will be fine, Rosalie.’

  But even as he says it, even as he marvels at the effortless suppleness she brings to sex, he wonders if it is true. Her face, so close to his, is out of focus, so that he only sees patches of skin or an earlobe or one eye or a few hanks of her dark-red, almost russet hair or her moist, ribbed lips. It’s like one of those French movies he loves, where lovemaking is composed in a series of arty hand-held shots. She breathes warm scented wine on him, which makes a communion with his own breath. He thinks, as he always does, that fucking is a way of trying to become one flesh. Their mouths are now – too urgently – attached, as if they are searching, like Dad’s chum Faustus, for the alchemy that will make a baby, the baby which she will dress all in gossamer material and which will learn to run, toes strangely springy and angled, after her ethereal mother, who is now beginning to utter, which makes him giggle, because this courtyard is only one course of bricks away from the neighbours on three sides.

  When she finally stands up and pulls down her skirt, he feels a deep warmth for her, which is actually, he knows, self-serving: he is released from the anxiety which has plagued him all day at the office. Dad and I, he thinks, are similar in this respect: even our relations to those closest to us are subject to our fascinated interest in our own feelings and states of mind. But then maybe everybody is the same and it’s just a question of degree.

  Rosalie sits sideways across his lap now, and puts her elegant arm around his shoulder and her head on his shoulder, like a reposing swan.

  ‘Don’t say anything,’ she says: and he knows that she doesn’t want h
im to spoil the moment. She is a believer in moments – intense, meaningful, fateful, numinous, although he doubts if she knows the word – and he has long ago realised that she sees the world in an intensely romantic fashion: she believes you must listen to your inner self and you must leave this self open to the unexpected and the spiritual. She thinks that too many people have closed themselves off to the transformative. For example, she believes in the magic of theatre. And it seems that his father, judging by his catatonia when Darcey Bussell was on stage – the little intense forward movements of his head, almost as if he were gulping down some nourishment only art can produce – also shares in this idea of magic.

  He holds Rosalie very close as he contemplates the moment. He looks at the changing filigreed light on the walls and up at the London sky, still retaining some if its underbelly gleam, with the orange of the sodium lights catching the undersides of the clouds, and he listens out for that rumble which never goes away, a rumble, a moan you don’t hear unless you make a conscious effort. It is cut by sirens and even helicopters and, at this time of year, by disputatious cats, but it’s always there for a city boy like me, he thinks, to provide comfort, the sound of humanity. It seems to have a kind of consistency, the noise of machines and the more intimate noises – Rosie’s choked cries, the clatter of crockery, fractious babies, music (including the deep throb of hip hop from passing cars) – all contributing minutely to this unorchestrated symphony.

  To him this sort of thing is pleasingly random. But Mum was always preparing herself for greater understanding. Her Pilates and her yoga were the five-finger exercises in this cause. In fact her attention span was quite short: she said herself she had a butterfly mind. He finds that he misses her still every morning when he wakes. For the last year before she died he rang her promptly as he set off for work on the short walk between this little house and the underground. He knew these conversations were precious to her, but he didn’t realise until she died how much they meant to him, too. She had given them some money for the house and when she died she left them enough in her will to pay off the mortgage. Dad in the meanwhile is talking of selling their house – the family home – and buying a flat. When people are bereaved they seem to need to make radical adjustments. Why not stay where you are? Or does that suggest you can’t move on? There is something strangely adamantine about Dad these days, as though he’s happy to go through the motions for the moment, but seems to have plans of a personal nature: nothing is settled, his life isn’t over. Perhaps he thinks that Lucy and I want him to subside into quietude, like an extinct volcano. Lucy is the one who imagines that some opportunist with re-inflated tits is going to snaffle him. Like Rosalie, she is sure he is working out in order to be ready to take his clothes off when the moment arrives. Rosalie says that men believe their cocks look bigger when they are thin. Women think like this: they are often more basic and more direct, which goes against the popular mythology. Counter-intuitive is the phrase the senior partner Robin Fennell, Dad’s pal, favours. After nearly three years as a lawyer, Ed sees that successful people in the law and in corporations have an urge to acquire a philosophy, which conveniently explains why they are entitled to such a large portion of the world’s riches, and that is because they understand human nature and the springs of action in a way that politicians and journalists and commentators don’t. Robin writes letters to the paper.

  Now Rosalie is in the tiny kitchen. She has put on some world music, which comes from countries where the musicians have an enviable ease with their cultural traditions and run-down landscape. He quite likes it: it goes with the Ali Baba feel of the tiny courtyard. He pours himself another deep glass of Sophie’s – excellent – 2002, and swallows it. Barely concealed in the straw-coloured and oaky wine is an advance warning of a headache. Judging by the anarchic clamour coming from the kitchen – it reminds him of the sudden, violent and unexpected timpani of world music – Rosalie, normally very deft, is a little drunk, too. He can see their future as replicating Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Robin Fennell is slightly in love with Rosalie; three times when they had him to dinner a week ago he said what a great cook she was. He made it sound as though he believed there is a direct line between being good in the kitchen and being good in the sack. Perhaps this is part of his life philosophy, developed in his climb up the greasy pole. Matrimonially, it hasn’t all been plain sailing for him: his third wife has just left him, which is why he asked himself to dinner. He is listed as a patron of Covent Garden, starter tier, but it turns out – Ed looked at the records – that the money actually comes from the partners’ fund. They don’t give enough to warrant a box, but they do have an unobstructed view and, under the terms of their membership of the Artists’ Circle, the opportunity to go to rehearsals. This, Ed sees, is another aspect of the financially successful male’s world view, his urge to appropriate some creative clothing by giving money or by buying art, because surely to be so rich means that he has understood how the world works and has applied some creativity. Even if it’s only in accounting, he thinks.

  Fuck them. Wine can do this: it can help you see how things really work. A lawyer can join the Artists’ Circle. Christ is risen.

  3

  On the train Lucy sees a group from the near suburbs, mothers and daughters probably heading for Oxford Street to shop together. They sit tightly grouped, occupying facing benches. The daughters’ hair is a little more relaxed than their mothers’; still, it is streaked and crimped and bleached. It’s as if outside a fairly tight cordon around central London you arrive in a world of white-leather sofas and fast food and criminal hairdressing. The mothers’ hair has been tormented, sometimes into strange butch cuts, sometimes in a waved carapace like a walnut, sometimes streaked with pink or blue. The mothers and daughters are all fat. This fatness comes in cheerfully displayed rolls in the young, in slabs of marbled fat on the upper arms of the mothers, like clothes hanging from a washing line. Their backsides are formless in different ways, but the common theme is that the motive force has departed. What is missing from these bottoms is muscle.

  The older women in the group are in high spirits; their voices are harsh, almost metallic, corroded by smoking. They are not old: none of their daughters is more than twenty and the mothers are only in their late thirties or early forties. The mothers favour comfortable suits of terylene. The girls go for pink, white belts, leggings and dangly earrings. No sign of their men: no Darrens or Jasons with the girls, no Steves or Kevins with their mums. The girls hold their mobiles as if even down here under London they are likely at any minute to receive a message that will change their lives. Lucy wonders what they are hoping for. They talk in a new hybrid dialect, partly Afro-Caribbean, partly cockney: one of the girls says, No, I nevah dunnit. Another says, You ain’t listenin’ to what I’s sayin’. Strangely, Lucy envies them. They move in chattering, uninhibited flocks, like parakeets. By contrast, Lucy sees an image of herself very clearly: she’s alone. It’s not that she believes that every girl should always have a boyfriend, it’s the sense she has had since Mum died and she broke up with Josh that she has become isolated. Ed is wrapped up in the abstracted Rosalie, Dad is trying to recapture his youth in some way, and she, Lucy, at twenty-six, is wary and abandoned. She misses the Sunday lunches Mum produced, attendance virtually compulsory, even with the underlying tensions and pretence. In retrospect, she sees these lunches as beacons in her featureless landscape. Dad shows no sign of introducing any kind of form into their lives, and really, why should he?

  She gets out at Piccadilly Circus not far from where those doctors tried to blow up a nightclub and she wonders, as she shuffles through the huge gallery of the station, whether they had any idea that almost nobody in this part of town is from here; they are Arab, Chinese, African, Eastern European and various other denominations of Asian. The sink of Western decadence they were proposing to send sky-high would probably have contained as many believers as infidels, certainly more foreigners than English. Doctors! A
nd then they tried to blow up Glasgow Airport and one of them was incinerated. As she walks down Haymarket, she hopes her feeling of isolation isn’t making her seem a little weird to her colleagues at Grimaldi. There’s only so much understanding available; she never mentions her mother’s death and she fends off questions about Josh lightly, but she thinks that her friends are becoming a little wary of her. This, of course, makes her behave in a more self-conscious fashion. It’s a spiral, downwards, which will end with her eating quantities of chocolate and looking after a cat.

  While her mother was alive, Lucy had the feeling that she wasted her time in pointless telephone conversations and in writing letters – she refused all offers of email – and choosing presents for godchildren and nieces, planning to renew a bit of the kitchen or recover a few cushions or searching through gardening catalogues in a hopeless quest to make the unimpressionable London clay at the back of the house bloom. These pursuits, Lucy thought, were too trivial, too timid for a woman who had studied English at university. But recently she has realised, with all the force of a revelation, that every family needs one parent who is dependable and unselfish. And that certainly could not be said of Dad. He’s of the old school that thinks – although of course he would deny it – that men are made of finer material, which excuses them from the constraints of the trivial and the tedious. In fact they are obliged to avoid anything that will keep them from their higher pursuits, their grands projets, which turn out to be largely about the nourishing of self-worth.