To Heaven by Water

by Justin Cartwright

  ‘Golly gosh, Ed, what’s got into you?’

  ‘I’m a big swinging dick. I’m empowered. I’m a stud.’

  ‘I’ve already come twice.’

  ‘Only twice? Have some ambition, woman. Think twins, think triplets. Whole tribes. Oh my God.’

  His phone rings. It’s Alice.

  ‘Hello, big boy, how’s tricks?’

  ‘I rang you.’

  ‘I know. Look, I’m ringing you back. I was in the middle of a Strip the Willow practice. We bridesmaids are supposed to lead the Scottish dancing tomorrow.’

  ‘Are you having fun?’

  ‘It’s a laugh. Men in skirts. What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t think they wear undergarments.’

  ‘Let’s hope not. I’ll keep you informed. Did you ring for a specific reason, Mr Fineman, for example, or for a chit-chat?’

  ‘I just wanted to see how you are. I miss you.’

  ‘That’s so sweet.’

  But she doesn’t say she is missing him.

  ‘One thing, Alice, Robin called me in. He wants you to move to the child-support case. He hinted in passing that he thought we were a little too close.’

  ‘Oh did he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘I said we got on very well, but there’s nothing going on.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘What? What should I have said? Yes, we’re fucking like rats but it’s entirely professional?’

  ‘It’s funny, isn’t it, with these old-smoothie blokes. He tries it on and gets nowhere, and now he’s sniffing about. It’s sad. If you are ringing to bale out, feel free.’

  ‘Good God, no. I’m not. I just thought I should tell you.’

  ‘Thanks anyway. See you Monday. I’ve got to go and do the Gay Gordons.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Och aye, as we say up here. The whole regiment. Bye-bye.’

  ‘Bye.’

  When the phone goes dead he looks at it reproachfully for a moment as if it’s concealing something from him. He feels abandoned and a little unease seeps into his stomach. She is having fun, giving him barely a thought, and he is torturing himself both with his treachery and the question of what Scotsmen wear under their kilts. He can see her doing a reel, skipping about, face slightly flushed, enjoying the attention of these solid bankers, barristers and lairds. He sees a rugby scrum of admirers, with big calf muscles and thick, sandy hair, courting her. Their faces are perhaps a little fleshy and pale in this picture, but you can’t have everything. There’s something clannish and heavy-shouldered about them as they do the Gay Gordons. He has never seen a Gay Gordon, but he believes he knows exactly how it works, everybody hopping and twirling and eyeing the likeliest partner, and becoming a little moist on the charcuterie cheeks. There’s a determinedly conservative cast to upper-crust Scots, with their love of roast meat and their distrust of central heating and their use of the word ‘aye’. Worst of all is their unsubstantiated belief that they are superior to everyone south of the border.

  Under his duvet the tramp is beginning to shout. He’s a Scot! He’s fed up: Ed can almost see, floating in the air, the stream of cunts, fucks, bastards he utters, followed by inchoate threats to all who have done him wrong. Nobody takes any notice. Nobody suggests he go and take a one-way trip to a bench in Princes Street Gardens or deep-fry himself a Mars Bar and stick it up his arse. Instead they turn away to exchange those infuriatingly dismissive little English smiles, and carry on with their conversations.

  On the way back to work he passes a shop selling old maps and prints, and then he sees a boy and a girl standing outside a small office building which houses a stockbroker; they are carrying signs reading: This company supports experiments with live animals. Their posters reveal dogs and apes wired to diabolical machinery. Both of them are wearing camouflage jackets.

  The boy is speaking.

  ‘It was like in the Depression that the rich people sold all their shares, the J.D. Rockefellers and them, so that they could buy them back cheap. They made millions. It was like a huge scam.’

  The girl nods.

  ‘Yeah, I heard that, that’s like so fucking typical, isn’t it?’

  Three more of their colleagues turn up with pictures of dogs and monkeys wired up. They start shouting, ‘Stop animal experiments.’

  Two workmen in boots watch, amused: ‘Fuckwits.’

  Ed is inclined to agree, but he says nothing. After all he is a lawyer, a partner no less, and an adulterer. But suddenly he finds he has cheered up. It’s only been a lunch break, but he has seen a rich panorama. As for Alice, maybe it will be a good thing if she falls in love with a Pict in hairy clothes, so that he can get on with the business of baby-making and wealth creation.

  When he gets home, relatively early, Rosalie, too, is in a good mood. Robin has phoned to ask her round to see his new flat tomorrow. He’s said his budget is over one hundred thousand pounds. She will get fifteen per cent. Also, she thinks – actually, she knows – that she is pregnant. Like the French, the English now believe that a good meal is the only way to celebrate all significant occasions in life’s journey. He suggests a restaurant.

  ‘What are the signs?’ he asks, without wishing to sound sceptical.

  ‘I’m overdue, and my nipples feel funny,’ she says.

  The state of the nipples is the clincher. The minute examination of her physical changes is intimately tied to her mental state, which is mercurial. The question is, which comes first?

  Later at the restaurant she says no to champagne, her face severe, because of her condition. Just as he’s finishing off a glass of Pol Roger, she says, ‘Oh no,’ very quietly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s started.’

  For a moment he thinks she is in labour.

  ‘My period.’

  She’s crying now, just a few delicate drops. He feels irritated, which is the wrong response, and unsettling.

  ‘Let’s go home, darling. I’ll explain that you’re not well.’

  ‘I’m perfectly OK.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Crazy? Mentally unstable?’

  ‘Darling. No, no. Not at all. I just mean I would make an excuse.’

  ‘Make an excuse for your wife who is so loopy that she cries when she can’t have a baby. What a weak, silly fool. She must be excused. And of course you must never look bad in public.’

  She stands up; he’s not sure whether she is leaving or going to the Ladies’. With relief he sees that she is heading that way. One day he walked in there by mistake and saw two young women kissing deeply. It was an erotic image, which lingered. One of them winked at him as they passed to their table. He sits alone and uneasy. Eventually Rosalie returns, her face now composed, even philosophical. A sort of fatalistic serenity has seized her, so that she looks as if she is just an anonymous worshipper in a religious procession, although, of course, she is alone. She often needs to concentrate on a role to make sense of her life. When that is fixed, she is comforted. This is the artiste’s life, necessarily tragic.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘Sorry, darling, I was unfair.’

  ‘We’re in this together, Rosie.’

  ‘Are we?’

  ‘You know we are.’

  He holds her two hands over the small vase of anemones in the middle of the table. Her hands are very cold although the restaurant is warm, throbbing with human life.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  She moves her lips to form a small kiss, and nods. The kiss is the sort of impersonal blessing a holy person might convey on the laity. Why is he thinking in these religious terms these days? None of the family, except for Uncle Guy, is religious; he writes long, quasi-mystical letters from the bush. He left England soon after Dad became a television face, possibly unable to bear the thought that his younger brother had become undeservedly famous. In those days, apparently, television was regarded with awe, the viewers t
reasuring the gifts of enlightenment it brought.

  Meanwhile, Rosalie is suffering in silence, chewing unconvincingly on a premature artichoke, done in the Italian style on a grill and accompanied by some broad beans, all full of goodness; twenty minutes ago, when she ordered, Rosalie was thinking trace elements. Now she accepts a glass of champagne, its celebratory function ignored in favour of its tranquillising properties. They order the rest of the bottle. By the time they leave the restaurant, Rosalie has lost some of her severity and most of her dancer’s poise, and her feet seem to be making unusually clumsy contact with the pavement outside the Wolseley. In truth they are both drunk.

  She forgets the rituals, which involve creams and rigorous hair brushing, and slides into bed fully dressed. Ed finds himself worrying that the life will be crushed out of her favourite dress, the gravity-defying flower print (perhaps fuchsias), which contains a suggestion of Never Never Land, and he slips it off her. Her hair is spread over the pillows.

  He goes down to the kitchen and opens a beer, although he knows he will pay a price. Rosalie has already begun to think about the possibility of in vitro fertilisation although Mr Smythson had said it would happen naturally. Lucy told him. Lucy is a good listener and encourages other people to be indiscreet by her apparent interest. He turns on the television and watches tennis from New York, where of course it is still late afternoon. A very tall Slovak called Daniela Hantuchova is killing the ball with elegant disdain. She’s probably an economic migrant, like Mr Fineman’s assistant, but on a much higher economic plane.

  This little house, a hen coop really, was supposed to be the family home, a refuge, a haven for a small but plucky family, which would expand and prosper. The reality is that he is lying, idly lustful, on an Ikea sofa, watching Daniela Hantuchova, while his wife, reproachful even in sleep, lies in the marital bed, unhappy that she is being denied a child because of his inadequacy where it counts. And his mistress – if two sexual encounters really qualify – is stripping the willow in some draughty old pile in the Highlands. Her mind is on kilts; the lardy faces are closing.

  He has another beer and then two paracetamols.

  He wonders about the deal he has made with life. Is he a lawyer in his essences? Is he a family man whose only wish is to produce children and nurture them for twenty-five years and make sure they go to good schools and learn to ski and play the fucking oboe and get into Oxford? There’s something faintly fanatical about Rosalie and her determination to have children. He can already picture himself in the clinic again, passing his sperm sample through the hatch, and, he thinks – although of course he is drunk – that maybe he could make a run for it with Alice. But then he’s not sure Alice sees him as anything more than a diversion.

  And now he wishes Mum were still here with her sensibly ordered universe, which accompanied her wherever she went. He knows that life is not other than the one we live, but he wishes it were.

  9

  Sometimes you look at the place you live in and think happily about its possibilities: a new kitchen, all granite and squeaky-clean implements and ovens that never get dirty and subdued lighting, which demonstrates your command of stylish living and material goods, although you treat such things in an ironic fashion. And at other times you look at the place and think, This rat-trap should be condemned, with its ingrained dirt and a stove that looks like something that’s fallen out of an old tractor. Everything in Lucy’s kitchen is – and always has been – heavily greased like a Channel swimmer. A pigeon sits on the window ledge, watching her knowingly as she makes coffee. This pigeon is obese because Lucy leaves bits of bread and sometimes rice or pasta for it. It no longer flies anywhere; it has no incentive to forage. She thinks it is probably diabetic and depressed, although it gives every impression of contentment. The only time it stirs itself is when another pigeon tries to make a landing on the ledge: then it uses its impressive bulk to intimidate. Lucy opens the window a fraction and pushes out some muesli. The bird pecks at it without standing up; soon it will be like a battery hen, with splayed, useless legs.

  Viewed from a neutral standpoint, Ed’s, for instance, her relationship with Josh undoubtedly has comic aspects. But for her it is living proof of her lack of clearly defined principles. When Mum was still here Lucy could measure herself against her mother’s unbending standards, which included housekeeping and tidiness. Rejecting them was in itself reassuring. Now that Mum has gone she has very arbitrary standards, and of course arbitrary standards are not standards at all. On the one hand she’s happy to be free of the guilt her mother could invoke without trying – she had no need to try – and, on the other, she feels guilty that she is not living up to her mother’s expectations. It’s a muddle, a moral shambles.

  Mum died neatly and uncomplaining, although deeply distressed at the unimaginable prospect of never seeing her family again. A few days before she died she whispered, in the voice the drugs had made thin and at the same time rasping, ‘Look after Dad. He needs it, even though he won’t show it.’

  Was this true, or a self-serving idea that Dad’s detachment sprang from a kind of hidden need? On the face of it, he needed Mum less than she would have liked. But what your parents really think is forever a mystery. In the secret mesh of their lives, in the intricacies of their history, which included the production of two children, they must have suffered small wounds and developed instinctive understanding, like those climbing plants she learned about in biology which intuitively know how to find support. Did they have affairs? She doesn’t know. Were they sexually at ease? She doesn’t know. Sometimes she got the impression that Mum was impressed by Dad’s celebrity; although she said, ‘Oh, he just reads off the autocue,’ she knew that there was far more to it than that. He had a charm and an authority that reassured people. And some of his special reports made a huge difference to the public perception. One was his story of an Iraqi girl who had lost her whole family of fourteen in a bombing raid and was sitting with her mother’s body when the camera found her. Dad does not often speak about the horrors he has reported, but he said to her, ‘Look, anyone with a cameraman who found that girl could have done the story. It wasn’t me that made it a tragedy. I wasn’t writing a novel.’ Now, in his lean, ascetic reincarnation, he seems to be happy to be leaving the public consciousness.

  The problem with Josh, she thinks, is that he has a very ungenerous soul. When you become intimate with another, when your bodies are doing irrational and strange things, your lips devouring, your tongues entwining and so on, you are actually giving that person not only access to your body, but to your soul. But sex for Josh is a form of recreation devised solely for his benefit: it has no deeper meaning than ping-pong. Its only aim is to gratify him. He is the hero of their sexual encounters, he’s the narrator of his own epic. When he came round to the house and demanded to be let in and more or less obliged her to have sex, because she didn’t want Dad intervening if there was a row, she felt demeaned. She wanted to say he was using her, but she was sensitive to the soap-opera banality of the phrase. In the morning, as soon as she heard Dad go to the gym, she woke Josh, sleeping noisily, and kicked him out despite his protests.

  ‘You’re in love with your father. It’s sad,’ he said in that pompous and complacent way of his.

  ‘Oh just fuck off. This is it. The end.’

  ‘You wanted sex last night.’

  ‘I didn’t, actually. I only allowed it because I didn’t want to scream rape and wake Dad.’

  Now she is without a man again. In logic, women don’t require a man in order to exist, but in practice, as all women know, there are powerful old-world currents involved, which are difficult to swim against. A lot of this turbulence is created by women themselves. They will listen to men lecturing them, they will accept men’s relentless self-promotion or men’s explaining things they already understand, and they will in some minor ways submit; they do it because they don’t want to be alone. It is a perennial belief that women without men are incom
plete. Like so much else that is widely believed, it is untrue. It is a time of transition. Rationality – she thinks of those doctor bombers at the airport – is no longer winning. Ethics are unclear. History no longer has a purpose. Public service is discredited. Instead, gestures – supermarket credos, slogans and infantilism – are everywhere. A man who wants to have a proper relationship should understand these things: he should open his soul to you and want to enter yours. Of course you can’t use this kind of highfalutin language in a time of simplification, but you would recognise a generous spirit when you found one, that’s for sure. With Josh she found an empty vessel, although he is good-looking and, for someone who drinks so much beer, in good shape. She has formed a separate relationship with his cock, and she may miss that. It’s like the relationship you might have with a simple-minded Labrador or a seal. Also, she and Josh made a good-looking couple; arriving at dinners or parties together, she was aware that they made a strong impression. At first she enjoyed it but soon she realised he was always talking a little too insistently, underbriefed and half-informed, and she was embarrassed and tried to intervene to save him from himself. When it became clear to Josh that she thought he was a ‘dipstick’, she tried emollience: ‘No, not at all. I just thought maybe you were going on too long. They were all too drunk or stupid to keep up.’