Up Against the Night

by Justin Cartwright

  Lucinda sided with me when Georgina and I separated. Together she and I weathered the onslaught of Georgina’s lawyers. My wealth, Georgina will tell anyone who is prepared to listen – and some who are not – is her wealth. It is not true. Her story goes on to relate that, with the help of crooked lawyers, I was able to prise open the family vaults. The truth is that I knew that her family had a fancy tax-avoidance scheme in the Isle of Man and I kept this to myself until I had to play my trump card.

  Georgina raged about how I had spent her money; she had forgotten that it was she who bought large and decrepit houses in Notting Hill and turned them into lavish boutique hotels which failed and she forgot that it was she who set up doomed businesses which were intended to help the coffee growers of Nicaragua or to finance remote Indian communities in making saris or to support a cooperative in Venezuela which empowered women or to bring fresh water to impoverished villages in Zimbabwe – and many other causes.

  She loved her philanthropic work because it allowed her to mix with pop stars and models and designers and it allowed her to ignore the administration of the finances as she engaged in this high-altitude life. She saw no irony in rubbing up against rich pop stars, who are the visionaries of our era. At the same time she never cared for writers, unless they were huge best-sellers, as if sales were the only validation of a writer. She lives in a visual world.

  All her enterprises ended in theft, corruption and lawsuits. Many millions of her father’s legacy were lost. I tried to warn her and she interpreted these warnings as jealousy or a desire to control her. She said that men like me were incapable of giving women respect and space. She grew very still when I gave her advice, lifting her head and looking away as though she was hoping to see something more congenial and pleasant to rest her gaze on. I grew to loathe her, and this hatred affected Lucinda.

  One day Georgina declared that she was in love with a friend of my best man, and she demanded a divorce. I didn’t contest it; as a matter of fact I was delighted. The judge was something of a Leveller; he didn’t warm to Georgina’s family and its sense of entitlement, nor to the blustering and expensive QC who was drafted in at the last minute to oppose the settlement. A small, almost visible, cloud of self-esteem circled him, like one of those planets that are loosely wrapped in vapour and trailed by clouds of red dust. Or perhaps like an egg poaching in a little whirlpool of attendant egg white. But when I mentioned the family’s Isle of Man scheme, the QC quickly advised a settlement. Georgina described it to her friends as blackmail and they were quick to pass her opinion on to me. This all happened five years ago.

  As the result of this warfare, Lucinda had started to take drugs at her school and she quickly descended into drug hell. It happened very quickly, too quickly for me to understand or to recognise. Later she told me that drugs were available everywhere; in London, she said, if you were on heroin you were able to buy the stuff absolutely anywhere and you could find a dealer even in the smallest rural village. As a user you are able to spot dealers without difficulty; she said that, like the proximity of rats in London, you are never more than a few yards from a dealer. The dealers will unerringly recognise the addicts.

  Her problems have tormented me, because I know that Georgina and I were blinded by a bitterness that ran wildly out of control and destroyed our beloved child. Incongruously, I think of the African savannah when a sudden lightning strike ignites the dry grass. I seem to have acquired my own, African, set of metaphors. In some inexplicable way I believe that the African landscape exists deep within me, imprinted indelibly many years ago. My reveries often involve Africa. For instance, I remember my Tannie Marie’s farm and the huge raindrops falling on the tin roof and I remember the hail which followed, as big as golf balls, bouncing on the farm road and creating an arctic landscape which soon melted; I remember the forlorn bleating of the sheep lined up to be dunked after shearing in a plunge dip full of cloudy, pungent chemicals. And I remember vividly the black people who worked on the farm and who gave me mealie porridge from their cast-iron pots. I recalled how they rolled the porridge into a fat cigar shape and handed it to me with a delicately cupped hand; the skin of the palms of their hands was lined, strangely pale, and their eyes often had a yellow cast. Sometimes they gave me the porridge soaked in fermented milk, amasi, which Tannie Marie called maas. I think there must surely be some connection. I remember when Nestlé promoted an African drink on Springbok Radio: Introducing new Nestlé Make-it-Yourself Maas. Made from real milk to give you all the taste of traditional creamy home-made maas. We pronounced ‘Nestlé’ as ‘Nessles’.

  The black people, who had so little, were invariably kind to me; they were a little curious and perhaps a little concerned about a small white boy wandering around this derelict place.

  All these things, all these whispered messages, are becoming more important to me, as though I am hearing a lost language or a distantly remembered tune.

  6

  When I last saw her in California, nearly a year ago, Lucinda looked a lot better than she had been. At her worst, her face was strangely clotted, her features mysteriously rearranged – like ice floes that had jostled each other – and her eyes had become small and defensive as though she was wary of some violence or maybe just some gratuitous unkindness. I wonder if I am not imagining this. Is it possible for eyes to become smaller? After twenty months of expensive treatments at a clinic overlooking a bay in Marin County, north of San Francisco, which was apparently made restful by the sound of the nearby waves, she has recovered, although she has a tendency to talk about herself and her karma relentlessly. She may still believe in positive energy; she has gathered it wholesale in California. Dr Hirsch, her psych and mentor, wrote to me, with her permission, to pronounce her clean.

  Lucinda has never been to the beach house but I am hoping she will love it. She will be able to hear the waves falling on the beach and maybe that will keep her calm. It is encouraging that she has agreed to come at all; perhaps she has shaken off her torpor. As a child she was always cheerful and eager so the decline into drugs was terrifying, as if another person was inhabiting her delicate and familiar body without permission, a form of kidnap.

  I find the crashing of the waves on the beach below my house uplifting, as though they are designed particularly to speak to me, to confirm that I live somewhere wild and elemental and dangerous. Larcenous baboons come to visit us occasionally. Once we found stranded whales on the beach, and three years ago a seventeen-year-old boy was thrown off his surfboard and driven by a huge wave into some enormous, egg-shaped rocks where his arm became wedged high up in a cleft. As the tide came in we tried desperately to save him. It was a nightmare, with all the helplessness that entails: each incoming wave rushed over him more strongly. He would soon be underwater. Three of us swam out to the rocks and for a few long minutes I had his arm in my hands, trying to pull it free, but as the waves grew more insistent his arm was wedged more tightly and I was dragged away by the giant swell. Less than half an hour later he was completely submerged and he drowned in full sight. It was appalling.

  We commissioned a bench, made of driftwood, in his memory, all of us understanding that he had done something worthwhile in taking on the giant waves. We shared a sense that he had given up his life for others, by voluntarily taking on the unforgiving sea, perhaps trying to subdue it on our behalf.

  We had a bronze plaque made for the bench:

  Nothing of him that doth fade/ But doth suffer a sea change/ Into something rich and strange.

  I suggested these lines from The Tempest, lines that also commemorate Shelley in the Protestant Church of Rome. Familiar lines, but comforting in their promise of continuity.

  Now Georgina is forty-six. She is trying to have another baby with the unscrupulous encouragement of an in vitro specialist. She believes she can buy anything and, up to a point, she is right. The donor is her new partner. I have met this man: he is called Ranulph, a friend of the man she ran off with the first time.
The image of Ranulph providing sperm for my ex-wife’s purposes makes me feel queasy; I see it as an act of aggression directed to me and to Lucinda. I can only guess how Lucinda will react to this latest betrayal.

  I was a difficult husband, but it was because I hardly ever agreed with Georgina on any issue of taste or judgement. I would quibble about all sorts of things, not because I believed in what I was saying, but as a form of hostility. I had reached rock bottom. I was losing my humanity.

  Our house was increasingly a source of distress to me: it looked like an advertisement for one of Georgina’s doomed boutique hotels, strangled by swags and plumped by garish cushions; the knick-knacks twinkled at night and the whole place had the feeling of a seraglio painted by John Frederick Lewis. I felt endangered as I sat on a sofa, as though a giant clam was about to swallow me. Georgina believes fervently in the supreme importance of design; for her it is a fundamentalist faith.

  The things that were important to me, like books, were redundant to her – old school – as if there were exciting new currents of energy dashing about that I was not tuned in to. I remember something I read a few months before: ‘I have beliefs, but I don’t believe in them.’ I take this to mean that there are conventional beliefs – serviceable, everyday beliefs – which are handy but really no more than placebos. And then there are deeper questions about the unknowable mysteries, like death, the importance of great art, the impossibility of knowing another’s mind and the nature of culture.

  Georgina is still keeping tabs on me and she pays close attention to any potentially lasting relationships. For instance my love affair with Nellie Erikson, who is Swedish and forty-one years old, nearly twenty younger than me. I met her at a dinner party given by my friend, Zoe. She told me later that she had been matchmaking: it was obvious that I needed a wife. Women do this so as to patch up the cracks in the human fabric. Nellie and her husband, Lars, were in the throes of a divorce because of his drinking. She told me about Lars and I told her about Georgina and I fell in love with her that evening. We were both adrift and clung together.

  ‘Thank God for you,’ I said to Zoe one day. ‘Nellie has changed my life.’

  ‘I was worried about you. Now you look happy again.’

  ‘Was it that obvious?’

  ‘Yes. Sorry to say so, but yes, it was. In fact you looked miserable. You weren’t shaving properly either. That’s a sign. Frank, there aren’t many good men about, but you are one of them. Georgina was horrendous. We all knew. We all felt sorry for you.’

  ‘Thank you. Thank you, Zoe.’

  Even so I felt a little affronted that she and her friends should feel free to pass judgement in this way. Nothing in a marriage is what it seems to be.

  Georgina sends emails filling me in on Nellie’s past; at various times she has said that Nellie is an obsessive and that she is the daughter of a Swedish fraudster. Also, according to Georgina, Nellie is one of those women approaching middle age who spend their whole lives in spas and gyms because they are insecure. But her letters are mostly reserved for more serious charges against me; I really belong in jail for stealing her money. Her worst charge is that I drove our daughter away. This accusation upset me for days. I had thoughts of killing her. I called, breaking my rule of never starting a conversation with her.

  ‘Georgina, look, can I ask you not to make wild accusations about what I did to Lucinda?’

  ‘Oh dear, are we upset? What can I say? You threw her out. That is the fact. You did it to get at me.’

  ‘Oh Jesus, this is borderline certifiable. You had no relationship with her, she loathes you, you ran off with that fruitcake, and all her life you were always putting Lucinda down.’

  ‘You threw her clothes out on the street.’

  ‘The psychiatrist said we had to get her out of the house so that she could try to work out her problems herself. He said it was the only way forward. You know what he said. We discussed it many times.’

  ‘You just wanted to get rid of her for selfish reasons. You hid behind the psychiatrist. Out of sight, out of mind. That was your policy.’

  I felt as though a stroke was coming on. I didn’t speak to her for months.

  She still calls me, ostensibly to talk about Lucinda, which of course I can’t refuse, but she quickly returns to the subject of Nellie: ‘What do you think she is looking for with all that yoga stuff? Mental stability?’

  She is also dangerously thin, apparently, verging on the anorexic. I wonder why Georgina, who tells people she hates me, is so interested in my life. And I wonder where Georgina gets her information. Maybe she manufactures it to order. While accusing Nellie of these crimes, she is proposing to have a baby via a test tube, with Ranulph, who is a failed estate agent. And this is a baby whose only purpose will be to increase Georgina’s self-esteem, which is already, if you ask me, dangerously inflated.

  The New Forest in winter is faceted with dew so that the gorse and the grass sparkle in the late, low sunshine. The ponies are lively; at this time of year a few select stallions, highly sexed little boulevardiers, are released onto the forest for a short time, to launch a kind of horsey bacchanalia which will improve equine diversity.

  As I pull up in front of the house, Nellie comes out. She is holding a huge bunch of coppery hydrangeas and wine-dark sedum. Her blonde hair is tied back loosely. My dark thoughts fade away. She always looks happy to see me, and my heart lurches in response – I am conscious of the overburdened heart, responsible both for our blood supply and our emotions. Her chin is large and her blue eyes are some way apart, an almost feral arrangement which I have learned is typical of Swedes. She looks in this regard like Agnetha of Abba, beautiful in an elusive way. When she kisses me I feel blessed. As her softly pliant mouth meets my rough cheek I am keenly aware that we are made of different materials. I am built for another sort of life, a life long gone.

  ‘Hold me: you are like a bear.’

  ‘A bear?’

  ‘Yes, and you see many things.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘All sorts of things. You are unravelling the secrets around you. You are always on a journey.’

  My arms are around her slender, responsive body; I am strangely flattered by what she said even though I don’t know what she means. I take it as a compliment.

  The flowers are squeezed between us for a moment. There is something so serene and reasonable about Nellie that, after all the years of reproach and criticism and argument and silent rage, I am at last calm. Her body has a natural talent for fitting itself very closely to mine, hugging the contours; I told her that she was like a gecko on a wall, but she didn’t know what a gecko was. Apparently they don’t exist in Sweden.

  I unpack the car and join her in the house; she is arranging the flowers now in a blue-tinged Kosta Boda vase; a swirling blue infiltrates the clear glass in streams, like offshoots of the Northern Lights. Nellie goes in for the simple and the seasonal. Georgina ordered single hothouse stems of tall red amaryllis in bud and she arranged them in glass bowls. Sometimes she cut off the stems and launched the amaryllis heads in huge shallow dishes – an oriental touch – dotted with small candles floating on the surface. My Tannie Marie had just a few prickly pear flowers in jam tins and, deep down, I still see perfect, over-bred and cosseted flowers as pretension, a sort of indulgence.

  Nellie has lit a fire in the Swedish stove, and the scent of wood smoke fills the house. She has brought herring and yellow peas for soup and gravadlax and meatballs.

  ‘Thanks for all this.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asks.

  ‘You know Nellie, you know. I am so completely happy just to be with you. I long to see you when we are not together.’

  I am taken by an intense feeling of joy. She smiles. She looks very young; she has a son, but she has escaped the ravages of childbirth. After childbirth Georgina became drawn; sleep deprivation manifested itself in the spaces under her eye sockets, where fine curlicues appeared. This ageing terri
fied her; she had been a model and minor actor when she was young. For Georgina no minor wrinkle could be tolerated. She patronised clinics in Switzerland, which administered Alpine plant extracts, she travelled to expensive plastic surgeons in America and she spent hours in the gym with a personal trainer. Lucinda was neglected when I went to my office in the City.

  As a child she was left with a succession of nannies. It broke my heart when she called for her mother. Early on I understood that I was no more than the necessary husband, qualified only to bear witness to the sacred relationship of Madonna and Child, something which existed mostly in Georgina’s mind. And it was then that I understood fully that she preferred image to reality in every possible way.

  I have the comforting idea that Nellie and I can come even closer, that we can share our essences, even though I don’t know how that would happen. I am aware that there is still something a little awkward in my expressions of love for Nellie, as though I am learning from a guidebook about a distant land, but I need to tell her how happy she has made me; I may be a little insistent in my neediness. I excuse myself on the grounds that what lovers say should be kept private for fear of ridicule.

  Now Nellie is busy, making supper. She directs a smile my way. Her clothes and apron are pale blue and white. I have seen that blue is a colour Swedes cannot live without.

  ‘Can I help you, darling?’

  ‘It’s fine,’ she says. ‘I am just making simple meatballs, Swedish style. Just as good as Ikea by the way.’

  ‘I love them. I love meatballs. I love herring. I love Ikea. I love you. You are so kind. And so beautiful. Are you looking forward to Cape Town?’

  ‘Yes, I am. I can’t wait to get there and I am longing to see Lucinda again.’

  ‘Lucinda will need you.’

  ‘I know, but really, she needs you more.’

  ‘I can’t do it without you. I love her but she always manages to upset me.’