Whatever You Love

by Louise Doughty

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘Checking what ringtones you’ve got,’ he replied. ‘You’ve had that one for ages.’ Just before he turned away, I saw that he was flicking through my call log. I should have been worried or offended – if any of my previous boyfriends had done it, I would have gone berserk – but instead, and this bothered me, I was pleased, flattered.

  He had very good table manners – for a large man, his movements were surprisingly small and neat. He had a strange grace. I never saw him drop anything, or trip over, whereas I did both all the time. He had no physical tics or mannerisms that I could discern and teased me mercilessly when I flicked my hair. He only moved if there was a purpose to the movement, yet beneath his apparent stillness was a sense of coiled energy. He asked questions all the time. I never saw him bored.

  He was only half Welsh, on his mother’s side, but in terms of his personal mythology it loomed far larger than half. He had grown up in a small coastal town not far from Aberystwyth but his family moved to Eastley when he was thirteen, where he promptly got into fights with English boys as soon as he opened his mouth. His accent was slight but became more pronounced when he was angry or felt threatened. He followed Welsh football matches, although he was indifferent to rugby. He teased me about being posh because of my English accent, which annoyed me because there had been a lot more spare cash floating around his childhood than mine.

  When his mind was elsewhere, it was pointless trying to get his attention. ‘I’m task-orientated,’ he said loftily, when I complained to him. We were in bed at the time. I groaned out loud and put a pillow over my face. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What?’

  Just before he had an orgasm, he would swear profusely, which I found amusing, although I was careful never to tell him that.

  *

  ‘There’s only one way to make sure a boy’s family likes you,’ my mother had told me when I was still a gawky adolescent, ‘and that’s to make sure they didn’t like the girlfriend that came before you.’ Her face was becoming expressionless by then, the muscles increasingly immobile, speech slurred. She stared a lot. She rarely blinked. I had to remember how her face moved when she used to speak and add a layer of animation over her demeanour, along with volume to her words, a smile.

  *

  I was invited to meet David’s family at a large gathering to celebrate the seventieth birthday of a favourite aunt, Lorraine. David had one sibling but an inordinate number of aunts and uncles and cousins who had formed an established Welsh enclave in Eastley long before his family arrived. It was winter, we had arrived after dark, sleet was falling softly. The world looked good but felt bitter. We had been on the doorstep in the cold, ringing the bell repeatedly, for some minutes, huddled together beneath the yellow light above the porch. Music was thumping from the bay window of the sitting room at the front of the house but the curtains were closed. David said if there was no answer in a minute he was going to bang on the window even though it would mean trampling a flowerbed.

  At that point, Aunt Lorraine flung the door open saying, ‘Yes, yes, all right…’ Seeing it was us, she stood back to make a careful appraisal. She nodded once, leaned forward and hissed, ‘You’ll do very nicely,’ before grabbing my arm and pulling me inside.

  Then she turned to David, still on the doorstep, and declared, ‘But you can piss off, boy!’ and slammed the door in his face. I saw his expression just before the door closed and guessed that this was a joke played many times before and one he found excruciating. I, on the other hand, had had a large gin and tonic on an empty stomach in the pub before we came and thought it rather funny – mad, but funny.

  Lorraine’s hallway was decked with foil streamers. She was a hefty woman in beige, her face alight with a beamy smile. She cackled affectedly and pushed at my arm. I heard merry laughter from above and looked up to see that an uncle was descending the stairs, zipping his flies and ho-ho-ho-ing like Father Christmas. Lorraine linked her arm with mine and, leaving David on the doorstep, pulled me towards the sitting room, which bulged with people, noise and cigarette smoke. She flung the door wide and pushed me into a large number of coloured balloons and curious faces. The furniture and decor were lost behind the faces and balloons. ‘Here she is!’ Lorraine shouted above the music.

  Before I could speak, another aunt was upon me. ‘Ooh, let’s take a look at you, girl, we’ve all been waiting.’ I felt her fingers plucking at my coat sleeve. ‘Well, you’re a big improvement on the last one, I must say.’ She leaned in close to me. Her breath smelt of gherkins. ‘Wore a lot of synthetic fibres, did the last one.’

  David was at my elbow. He didn’t look amused. ‘Leave her alone until she’s got her coat off,’ he grumbled.

  Someone thrust a drink into my hand. ‘Try this punch. It’s disgusting.’

  David removed it from my hand and said in my ear. ‘Kitchen. Now.’

  In the kitchen, he turned to me and said drily, ‘God, they get more like a bad sitcom every time but hey, you’re a hit and you haven’t even opened your mouth yet.’ He pulled at the fridge door, which resisted, relented. He took out a bottle of wine.

  ‘What was wrong with the last one?’ I asked, equally drily, sliding my coat off my shoulders, looking around for somewhere to hang it, then dropping it over the back of a kitchen chair. We had been going out for three months – I had just started counting in months rather than weeks. I longed to stop being sardonic with him. Why were we still wisecracking in private – in public, yes, but between ourselves? When could I stop pretending I felt less than I did? When would the signal come from him and how would I recognise it?

  He rolled his eyes. ‘She was an accountant. She had a voice like this…’ He pinched his nostrils together and made a nasal sound.

  ‘Stuck-up little cow,’ said Lorraine as she blustered into the kitchen carrying a blue, oval-shaped platter, empty but for a few wisps of flaky pastry. ‘We were terrified our David was going to marry her.’ She pronounced his name the Welsh way, Dav-eed. She dumped the platter in the sink, on top of what was there already, and picked up another, full platter from the counter top, whisking off some cling film to reveal a neat arrangement of tiny withered samosas with cherry tomatoes dotted between. ‘Thank God she got wise to him before that.’ She handed it to me. ‘You know what they say about Welshmen, don’t you, girl? They make wonderful fathers cos they’re such children themselves, but terrible husbands mind.’ She turned away, then said over her shoulder, ‘Be a love and take that through for me. I’ve still got the spring rolls in the oven. They’ll be hot, anyway, even if that lot isn’t.’

  I understood this was a test and did as I was bid, pulling a face at David as I passed him with the platter in my hands.

  *

  As we left the house, three hours later, David slung his arm around my waist and pulled me in so close he made me squirm, digging his fingertips into me. ‘You were great!’ he murmured, and bit my ear. I was a bit drunk, a bit tired, and wondered if this was it, the signal – I had met his family and I had passed. I wasn’t a stuck-up cow and I didn’t wear too many synthetic fibres. Now we were a couple in public, so to speak, could we be one in private too? I wasn’t afraid of eccentricity. Having always considered myself something of an oddball, I had found it easy to take his large, voluble family in my stride. Previous girlfriends from nice, nuclear families had found them all somewhat intimidating, I later gathered, had been put off by the smoking and shouting and occasional outbursts of anti-English sentiment. Those family gatherings were always on the edge of chaos. I had known from the first moment I had met David that he was chronically impulsive, giving of himself and self-centred in equal measure, and used to being indulged – now I had seen him in the context of his extended family, it made perfect sense.

  Later, I came to love them, the aunts and uncles – even his parents who were probably the most restrained of the lot, and his sister who was four years older than him and married with three children and rare
ly spoke except to be even more sardonic than her brother. A whole family; and they swallowed me whole.

  We had walked only a few hundred yards from Lorraine’s house when David stopped suddenly in the middle of the icy pavement, turned to me, and looked at me as if he had just realised his pocket had been picked and suspected me of being the culprit. I looked back at him, thinking he was about to tell me he had left something behind at the house, or that his lower back had gone again.

  He shook his head a little, then strode off down the road, leaving me to trot after him in the cold. He always walked at a ferocious pace. I caught up with him and pushed my arm through his – he had his hands shoved deep into his pockets. I peered round and up at his face, questioningly, but he ignored me and was silent the rest of the way home. When we got back to my tiny, two-room flat he wouldn’t take his coat off. He sat slumped in an armchair while I made us both tea in the kitchenette, glancing at him from time to time as I tried to work out what was wrong. When I handed him the mug, he took it without comment and drank it in silence. I sat down in the opposite chair with my own mug and did the same, waiting for him to explain. I was expecting him to stay the night – he usually did – but all at once, he rose from the armchair, took his mug into the kitchenette and emptied the remaining contents into the sink. He rinsed it and turned it upside-down on the drainer. He came over to where I sat, stooped and kissed the top of my head – very tenderly, as you would do a child – then left.

  Up until then we had spoken most days, but after that, I didn’t hear from him for a fortnight.

  *

  My mother hated me going for walks on the cliffs. ‘Cliffs crumble,’ she said, and I whooped at her and said it sounded like a pop singer who sang novelty songs: Cliff Crumble. ‘You may laugh,’ she said, wagging her head, ‘but the people who were in that cottage didn’t think it was so funny, did they?’ She was referring to an event that took place in 1953. A chunk fell off one of the cliffs and half of the cottage that was sitting on the chunk went with it. A photograph appeared in the newspapers afterwards and it still shows up on the cover of local history pamphlets in the library: a black and white shot – often given a sepia wash in the pamphlets – showing a wonky cottage with a wall missing and the sitting room open to the elements: a standard lamp, a sofa, flowered wallpaper. ‘The people who were in that cottage didn’t laugh.’ In actual fact, the owners had had plenty of warning of the danger and were nowhere near at the time but this remark was typical of my mother who saw danger everywhere. One morning, she had looked up from her breakfast cereal to see her husband slumped on the kitchen table, dead from a heart attack at the age of fifty-one. One minute, she had been eating Weetabix – or whatever it was my mother had for breakfast – while I was asleep in my pram and my milk bottles sterilising in a bucket of diluted chemicals – and then the next, she was a widow. Cliffs crumble. Cars crash. Tree branches give way and stair carpets turn maliciously shiny beneath small, hurrying feet. It was amazing she let me out of the front door.

  Later, when she was ill and I was her carer, she had no choice. Once a week, when the district nurse was there or when a neighbour popped in, I would pull on my old pair of trainers, the ones with the broken laces, and head up to the cliffs.

  Cliffs crumble. David and I went up to the cliffs a lot in the early days of our relationship. Our first encounter, against the tree in the park, turned out to be a portent. He liked outdoor sex – he liked it a lot. Outdoors had never been my thing, particularly, but I was so crazed about him I probably would have done it on a bench in the High Street if he’d asked me.

  Our clifftop walks answered both our needs. I would stride along and let the cold wind numb my face, and think of the sense of freedom I felt when I went there as an adolescent and marvel that here I was now, a grown-up, feeling freedom in an opposite kind of joy, trapped by my glorious obsession with David, loving my imprisonment. And half an hour or so into our walk, when we were high above the town with open fields on our left and the great grey heft of the English Channel to our right, David would hustle me behind a rock or fence and I would laugh and protest until the moment when I fell silent with the seriousness of it, rendered mute by the intensity of his desire and loving his desire so much my own hardly counted. Truly there was nothing better: the moments when this man that I wanted so badly wanted me even more badly in return.

  *

  He didn’t ring me for a fortnight and during that fortnight I came to the conclusion, quite naturally, that I had been dumped. I resisted ringing him myself more out of pride than judgement. I couldn’t believe that he didn’t even have the courage to call me and tell me he had finished with me – I was furious and, in my fury, certain that my mourning for him was as good as done. When he eventually rang, I would be able to be suitably cool.

  It was a Saturday morning. I knew it was him calling as soon as my mobile vibrated in the pocket of my jeans. There was no one else who would ring me on a Saturday morning. I contemplated screening his call even as I slipped the phone out of my pocket and raised it to my ear. ‘Dodgson, hey Dodgson, it’s me…’ He liked to call me by my surname, a legacy of the boys’ grammar school he had attended, where, after he had stood up to the boys who tried to punch him for his accent, he had thrived. He liked to use my initials too. LD. Disbelievingly, I heard myself say, ‘Hi…’ in a seductive, luxurious tone, as if I was languishing on my sofa dressed in a negligee and furry mules, twisting a string of pearls between my fingers.

  ‘Fancy a walk on the cliffs, Dodgson?’ I glanced outside the window, where a wild wind shook at the fragile panes of glass. I had just come back from a trip to the newsagents and was planning a cup of coffee and three biscuits with the weekend newspaper and the gas fire on maximum. I was still wearing my hooded fleece and parka. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Yeah, okay.’

  *

  We met at the end of the esplanade where the cliffs took a rash swoop upwards, away from town, at an incline sharp enough to discourage both the very young and very old – on a day like this we would have the cliffs to ourselves. David was there first. He was wearing his big old suede jacket and a beanie hat. The middle button on the jacket was dangling by a thread, about to fall. It had been like that for as long as I had known him. He looked pale and handsome, a little tired – there were slight bags beneath his eyes. We stared at each other as we approached and I had time to appreciate, consciously and openly, what I loved about him, this man – the opacity of him, a mercurial mixture of pride and insecurity, a capacity for hiding things twinned with a terror of not being found. Here he was, this man, and that was all he was, and his life had collided with mine when we could so easily have never met, and I knew then that I loved him because of his faults, not in spite of them, and that I would no more change an ounce of him than sew that middle button back on his coat. It came to me that he had been involved with someone else when he and I met – I remembered those phone calls in the pub – and that he had not been open with me, and that he had discarded her, perhaps only recently, and that a similar fate would probably be mine, and that I didn’t care: I felt the swoop and fall of all this and knew I was in bigger trouble than I had ever been in my life.

  He smiled as I neared him. My stomach folded. All the reproaches I had been saving up for the last fortnight seemed childish and petulant. He held out his hand as I drew close and I extended mine. He took my hand firmly in his and pulled me after him as we turned to walk up the steep incline. We took wide strides, panting, layered in clothing and beaten by the wind. When I opened my mouth, the cold air snatched the breath from it. The sky above was hard white.

  At the top of the incline, the walk was open to the elements. There was no fence between the path and the cliff and occasionally a tourist took a tumble from it; sometimes accidentally, sometimes not. Our coastal stretch was not picturesque but we were widely acknowledged as the best place for miles to come and top yourself. As David and I climbed higher, we reached the part of the walk where the c
liff sloped up in crazed, jutting plates – the scrubby grass went right up to the edge, as if a hill had decided to stop mid-air. Further on, the walk levelled out and you could see over the edge but the early, irregular parts of the cliff were particularly hazardous because of the overhang. To our left was farmland. Sheep were grazing on the sloping field that led down to the river, the chill wind ruffling their dirty-white wool coats. To our right, the world swooped upwards and ended with improbable suddenness in sky.

  David was striding hard. He had such long legs our gaits were out of step. I stumbled on the uneven grass. I let his hand drop and moved away from him a little, not meaning anything in particular, just making myself more comfortable to walk. He stopped and looked at me. I stopped too. He appeared to be about to speak, then changed his mind and continued walking. I followed, a little behind.

  He said something to me, but the wind caught his words and I didn’t hear properly, something about my kitchen.

  ‘What?’ I said, raising my voice.

  He turned to me. The expression on his face was irritable. ‘I said, you know, girl, I think it’s just a bit peculiar that you’re so keen on washing up but you never wipe the surfaces.’

  ‘What?’ I laughed.

  He leaned forward and grabbed me by the arms, bending me backwards. ‘Think it’s funny, do you?’ he said, mock-menacing.

  Mock-menacing was his habitual manner before sex. It was foreplay, and a shared joke. When I wanted sex I behaved mock-defiantly, in a way I knew would provoke it.