As he drinks his coffee, he feels blessed as though he has inoculated himself against bitterness by this unexpected sexual encounter.
He remembers what Lucy said: ‘Sylvie tells me she is working in an organic café, but is really a painter.’ It was a warning that a fruitcake and her dog had come to camp.
‘How are you, Sylvie? I enjoyed the book club...’
‘Oh, it was such a pleasure for us. A privilege. I just came by to drop off a little token. Actually, it is literally a token, from our local bookshop. A token of our appreciation. I was taking the dog for a walk anyway.’
Her hair, as he looks at it now, seems too abundant, like that guitarist’s from Queen, almost a periwig. She seems to be sheltering under there, as one might under a magnificent tree, just for the sense of occasion.
‘You shouldn’t have.’
‘I wanted to.’
She gives out a short, unmotivated giggle, and as she does so there is a significant movement under her blouse, which, despite himself, catches his eye.
‘Anyway, I was taking Wolfie for a walk. As I said. Did I? Yes.’
‘You didn’t walk all the way from Highgate?’
‘It’s not that far.’
Maybe she is suggesting that they are close neighbours who inhabit the same territory, share some turf. The dog, however, lies pretty still, as if tired, although lugubriously watchful. David has a picture of Sylvie roaming north London with Wolfie; she is a seeker after something, one of the many people who believe that it’s all out there to be discovered, if only you can acquire the knack.
‘I’d better go now,’ she says, but with an equivocal note.
‘I was just going to make some tea. I prefer tea. But seeing the Chardonnay’s open, how about a drink?’
‘Well, all right. Just a small glass of wine. I love this kitchen, by the way.’
‘It’s a bit shabby. I see that when people come.’
‘It’s got character. It’s you.’
It’s nothing to do with him; it reflects Nancy’s firm views on how things should be. He could tell Sylvie that for thirty-seven years he lived within Nancy’s domestic universe, bound by the greater force of her quotidian convictions, but he doesn’t want to exchange this kind of intimacy although he can already feel the warmth of the other kind reaching him. He wonders, as she tells him about her difficulties selling her pictures – she’s experimented with acrylics recently – what it would be like to have sex with her. He can imagine that there would anyway be consequences. She has an overwhelming femininity, a feminine neediness, which he knows would spell trouble. And also, he fears the humiliation of taking his clothes off and trying to cope with this abundance. Even though he has been working out, he knows that there is really no turning back for the human body, just degrees of decline.
‘Won’t you have a drink?’ she asks. ‘I feel a tad like an alkie drinking alone.’
‘OK, I will.’
‘Maybe one evening I could cook for you.’
‘That would be nice.’
‘What sort of thing do you like? I’m almost vegetarian. Just a bit of fish or chicken occasionally.’
‘Oh, I eat more or less anything.’
‘I don’t think your daughter likes me,’ she says skittishly. ‘How old is she?’
‘She’s twenty-six. In fact I think she does like you. Anyway, she hardly knows you.’
‘She probably thinks I am after you.’
‘I very much doubt it.’
God, I sound so stilted. He finishes his glass of wine. His phone rings. It’s Rosalie.
‘Sorry, forgive me, I must answer this.’
He walks to the stairs outside the kitchen. Rosalie is in tears. She wants to come round to talk about something, and he feels his spirits sinking.
‘OK, come as soon as you can.’
‘Sylvie, I’m afraid there is a bit of a crisis; you’ll have to go now. I’m so sorry. But I’d like to take you up on your offer of a meal some time.’
‘I understand. I hope it’s not serious.’
‘I hope not. It’s a family thing.’
‘Come, Wolfie, come, girl.’
She turns to the dog, her plain best friend, the way schoolgirls do when they have been snubbed.
‘I’m sorry I intruded like this.’
‘Don’t be silly. It was absolutely great, but something has come up. It’s bizarre – I can be here for days without a visitor.’
‘I don’t believe that. But whatever.’
He hugs her to make up, and feels the urgency of her breasts against him. The dog, gung-ho, is straining at the leash. She kisses him on the cheek and her lips are full, quite leathery, and scented with Chardonnay. She takes a handkerchief and wipes the lipstick from his cheek, which he thinks is deliberately intimate.
He tidies up a bit, now that he is fully conscious that the place is deteriorating under his stewardship. Rosalie’s taste is for the decorative and pastoral. He puts the wine in the fridge and keeps one glass out. In a way he is elated by these intrusions, three young women wanting his attention, because he feels that he is slipping unnoticed out of the world. Simon said over the steamed dumplings a few weeks ago that we are fading like frescos in unvisited churches. Simon likes Italian churches, and has a hit list of triptychs and frescos he must see before he dies. And this is an urge that David notices among his friends, the urge to store up abstract images and experiences, as though they will be handy on the other side. Why? Thirteen hundred years ago the Venerable Bede wrote, in that heart-stopping image, that a life is similar to a sparrow flying into a hall where the thanes and earls are feasting on a winter’s night. The sparrow flies briefly through the light warmth and out into the cold again, almost in a flash, Bede wrote, but we are utterly ignorant of what went before and what follows. From winter going into winter again. Simon is frightened of death but he doesn’t say that to his friends. Nor does he repeat Wittgenstein’s remark, now often heard, that death is not an event in life.
Half an hour or more goes by as he waits for Rosalie. The doorbell finally rings weakly – even the doorbell sounds as though it is on borrowed time. He is apprehensive.
She stands in the doorway for a moment, pale, her tea dress – all the rage, he has heard – striking a note of innocence. Her dress is similar to the one his mother is wearing, standing next to his naval-lieutenant father. Her russet hair is tied back, not with full balletic severity, but with some wisps hanging down over her face, although there is nothing dishevelled about her.
‘Rosalie. Come in, come in.’
‘Thanks, David. Thank you.’
She hugs him and begins to sob, so that he can feel the tremors passing from her highly tuned self into his, as if he is the seasoned, resonating body of a violin. Her sobs choke themselves and he leads her down to the kitchen. He feels hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with her distress, and he feels deeply dispirited, because he knows that Ed is at the bottom of it.
‘Would you like a drink or some tea? Or something?’
‘I would love some tea.’
He offers her the chair from which he watches television – he and Nancy rarely strayed from this basement – and he fusses with the tea. Rosalie sits elegantly slumped. He thinks of ballerinas between exercises, always nursing their overworked legs. He hopes she doesn’t detect the more earthbound legacy of Wolfie and Sylvie, dog hair and banal opinions. Rosalie comes from an altogether different class of womanhood and wouldn’t be seen dead communing with a dog. Luckily there is a lemon, just about OK, for her tea, and he slices that as neatly as he can, discarding the green-mottled bits.
He hands her the tea. The Tate Modern cups are grubby. He says gently in the voice he used in Bosnia and Rwanda and, even further back in time, in Nicaragua, ‘Would you like to tell me about it now?’
‘David, I am so sorry, but I have nobody else to speak to.’
He leans forward.
‘Is it to do with Ed?’
He
r eyes, which contain a few blood trails of distress, look up at him. She nods.
‘Did you know?’
‘Know what, Rosie? I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘Ed has been screwing some trainee from his office.’
‘Oh Jesus, are you sure?’
‘She told me.’
‘When?’
‘This morning.’
‘She came to see you to tell you that she was having an affair with your husband?’
‘Actually, she came to see me to tell me that she has been fired by Robin, for having an affair with my husband.’
‘Robin.’
It’s not a question, but she answers it anyway.
‘Yes, Robin. He’s got a crush on her and is always sending her little notes and presents, she said. And cute little emails.’
‘Has this been going on for a while? Ed, I mean?’
‘Not long. A few weeks, probably. But this girl, Alice, feels she’s been unfairly treated.’
And wants to share the misery around generously, David guesses.
‘Does she say she loves him or anything like that?’
‘To be honest, I don’t think she gives a monkey’s fuck about him. She’s just very young and up for a good time.’
He’s never heard her say anything that crass before.
‘Have you spoken to Ed? He may have another take on it.’
‘I haven’t spoken to him. He’s in Geneva. But also, as you know, we have been having fertility problems, and I just couldn’t face this now. That’s why I came to you.’
Now she draws her knees up and sits sideways in the old chair as if demonstrating her flexibility, which is impressive.
‘Rosie, what can I do?’
‘You’re his father.’
‘Do you want me to talk to him?’
‘Perhaps you could tell him that Robin has hinted to you that something has been going on.’
‘Wouldn’t Robin say something to him? He’s going to have to explain why this girl was fired.’
‘Alice.’
‘Why this Alice has gone.’
‘He may, but I think he’s got Ed where he wants him now.’
‘Let’s have a drink.’
She nods. Her nod seems to say that she has lost her hold on small details, and he opens a bottle of Newton Unfiltered from the Napa Valley. She stares in his direction; her stare is directed not at him, but beyond to the great imponderable.
‘Rosie,’ he says, as the cork comes fatly out, ‘I think that what we need here, particularly what you need, is to consider the consequences of doing anything too hastily.’ (He can’t really be sure, of course, because nobody knows another’s mind.) ‘I know Ed loves you, even worships you. If it is true what this Alice says – if it’s true – it may be that Ed is under terrible strain.’
As he drinks from his glass of the unfiltered Chardonnay he wonders irrelevantly why it hasn’t been filtered.
‘That’s why I came. I’m terrified that if I confront him he’ll say he loves her or something.’
‘Rosie, nobody, and I mean nobody, could imagine him loving anybody but you.’
In a way he’s speaking more for himself than for his errant, slightly chubby son. She’s weeping again, and now her face is hidden on her knees, so that he only sees the convulsions in the undulation and bobbing of her hair. He puts his hand on her shoulder, as one would with a child sobbing, and she looks up at him and rests her hand on his for a moment. He thinks that every movement she makes is borrowed from some ballet, as if ballet provides her whole emotional universe.
She looks up at him, her face very pale, misery draining the colour away in that mysterious fashion; her sobs have become sporadic tremors.
‘I’m so sorry, David. I have never really suffered in my whole life and I have no experience to draw on to deal with it. You just think it’s for other people. The idea that Ed could have been screwing this girl is unbearable. The worst is that we have been trying to have a child. Trying too hard, I am sure.’
‘Rosie, can I tell you something which I have never told anyone?’
She looks at him, her attention caught even though she is in terrific pain.
‘A couple of years after Lucy was born and I was away a lot for the BBC and then ITV, I found out that Nancy had been having an affair for two years. I was completely devastated. I know how you feel. It’s horrible and it seems like an attack on your inner self, a complete and utter humiliation, but worse because it’s a negation of your self and all the possibilities of life.’ (He finds himself warming to his theme.) ‘But I decided with Nancy never to mention it because of the children. I had anyway had a few flings, although of course I didn’t think they were important. They didn’t affect the children, for a start. And she never knew that I knew, although there were times when I was tempted to tell her. But the reason I am telling you this is because I think if you love Ed, you will forgive him and get over it. As I did.’
Although I never got over it entirely and never forgave Nancy entirely.
‘Is it really possible to forget?’
‘Probably not completely.’
But he can’t say that it is not possible until you find someone else, when the rites of love usually obliterate the other. And he would probably have left Nancy, except that, from the moment Jenni drowned, he believed he had forfeited his rights to second chances.
‘I can’t see how I can get over it. I feel as though I have been torn apart. Do you really think it’s possible?’
‘I really do.’
‘Can I have another glass of whatever it is?’
‘Of course.’
He pours and she drinks half the glass in one.
‘Maybe if I have a baby, that will help.’
‘I’m sure it will. It’s one of the things that everyone tells you, but of course you can’t really take it in until it happens, that once you have a child everything changes.’
In his experience, there’s also often a transfer of moral capital to the mother. Sometimes this has deep effects, the shifting of cargo in a storm, which can capsize the ship.
‘Do you have any music?’
‘I bought Das Lied von der Erde after we were at Covent Garden.’
‘Could you play it?’
He puts the CD in the little-used player and presses the button, which is not like buttons were, but more like a sixpence that has been run over on a train line. As a boy, he and his friend placed coins on the line, mostly coppers, because sixpence was his entire weekly pocket money. It was illegal to deface the coin of the realm. The coin of the realm is one of those sonorous phrases that people enjoyed and believed. His mother once said you must never approach royalty and he never has. Nor has he run with scissors.
Now, as Rosalie struggles to come to terms with the fact that she has been for ever diminished, that she has been granted no exemption from life’s humiliations and reverses, he feels heavy and burdened himself. He wonders how Ed could have put so much at risk. You never dip your pen in the company’s ink: that’s another old saying.
‘My feelings are so confused,’ Rosalie says. ‘I literally cannot think.’
Das Lied von der Erde, which seemed so soulful at Covent Garden, now has a suicidal gloom to it, a very poor choice. Rosalie responds to the sixth movement, ‘The Farewell’, in a very direct way. Her eyes are moist; the liquid resting on their surfaces catches the light from the large, clumsy spots. These spots have been here ever since he was photographed at home for the Sunday Times Magazine in 1973; then they were the height of chic, like the quarry tiles.
Rosalie is in thrall to her feelings, but feelings are not reliable in this situation: Feelings are stars which guide us only in the brightest daylight. He can’t remember who said it.
Her eyes seem to be looking for the music or what it represents, to see if she can somehow set a true course for her turbulent, chaotic feelings.
‘You have to accept that there is no q
uick fix. Gradually things will settle.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘I do. Absolutely.’
He doesn’t, but he can’t say this. Nor can he say that for the bystander there is a kind of fascination in these domestic dramas that the protagonists can never appreciate. He has seen enough marriages fail and he has heard enough bitter denunciations and listened to enough wildly one-sided accounts to know that, however hard you try, it is impossible to take someone else’s problems as seriously as they would like you to. And this is always true of jealousy, that is both consuming and demeaning, and even as you are being consumed, you are aware that you are demeaning yourself and even as you are demeaning yourself, you know that you are going too far and that people are bound to back away. But when someone tells you their troubles, you see with perfect lucidity the banality of the situation.
He pours Rosalie another hefty drink, which she downs before he has poured one for himself. Das Lied von der Erde is reaching its tragic climax. It’s excruciating. Rosalie is still gazing upwards – perhaps she sees Darcey Bussell – and moving her body minutely, as if she’s remembering every step and every hand gesture.
‘I’m as drunk as a monkey,’ she suddenly says. ‘Pissed as a fucking fart.’
‘Do you want some water?’ he says foolishly.
To Heaven by Water Page 17
