Four New Words for Love

by Michael Cannon

  Mrs Griggs has visited during his absence. All evidence of the kipper is gone. A salad beneath clingfilm has appeared in the fridge. He tears chunks of wholemeal bread and eats with relish, vine tomatoes popping like party balloons in his mouth as he scans the letters page. After lunch he takes a soft chair and turns on the television. Christopher watches the cavalcade in bewilderment. His chin touches his chest.

  He wakes with a start, silences the television and makes for the kitchen. The wall linking kitchen to dining room has been knocked through, the only one of Marjory’s improvements he agreed with. The room has pleasing, spacious proportions. The rear wall is glass, French windows leading on to a patio with two steps descending to the accommodating privacy of the long narrow garden. It’s early evening, perhaps seven, and glorious. The shadows are lengthening. He walks out to the perfume of cut grass. The adjacent garden has an oak placed just so, to filter sunlight for the benefit of anyone standing here, at this time of night, at this time of year, with the earth and sun standing in these relations, a configuration he can almost believe got up for his appreciation. Insects mill in the diagonal beams. The accumulated beauty strikes him like a blow. He breathes ten times, twenty, and looks at his feet as if expecting to find something has sloughed off.

  He returns inside. The structure of his day has revolved round the purchase of a newspaper and senile naps. The structure of his life folded like wet cardboard on his wife’s departure, and it’s not as if he can blame this on deranged grief. Was the seed of apathy always there? He sits for a moment at the kitchen table, taking stock, dredging memories like strata. A tender child, with a tender mother, taken absurdly early at a tender age. Which age, Christopher thinks, until the abstraction of senility, isn’t tender? The rapid instars of teens and adolescence. The groping hesitancy of excruciating courtship. Marriage. The career trajectory that flattened before achieving the degree of respectability his wife craved. Disappointment generally: with work, that wasn’t quite going to improve the world by even the subtlest of increments; with a marriage that seemed to petrify once the rings were on; with the vicarious frustration of his wife’s thwarted social ambitions, left consciously at his feet to augment his own disillusionment. His growing detachment. Resignation to fate and the intermittent consolation this affords. Marjory’s death.

  He looks again at the day’s newspaper and scans it with morbid fascination. He can’t remember a single thing. In a corner, in a pile denied the cleaner, stands a column of folded newspapers, bundled and tied in readiness for recycling, daily strata of history. He can’t remember any of that either. He can’t look at any theme in the top copy and tease its antecedents from the stack. His daily paper might as well go from shop to pile and cut out the middle man. And yet it wasn’t always like this. Evidence of past acuity is everywhere: in the marginalia of books strewn around and tidied by the cleaner. Two weeks ago he had prised one from the shelves and been surprised by the shy annotations in his handwriting: aides-memoires he couldn’t remember writing to texts he couldn’t remember reading. The world is being run by a generation younger than him for the benefit of a population younger still. Age is a cul-de-sac, a high tide that deposits few on a less populous shore.

  It was always assumed by both that Christopher would go first. Their financial, and her social arrangements, were based on this assumption. The accumulated insurance on his life would have rebuilt a small hotel. In insisting on these arrangements she’d been swayed not so much by actuarial tables, but her envisaged widowhood, which was more of the same really but without him: whist drives, coffee mornings, bridge evenings and other outings of that ilk that Christopher had been methodically excluded from in the expectation that she’d have to go it alone anyway. It suited him.

  In the light of what happened Christopher wondered if her involvement with the church was providential or ironic. She flirted with the superstructure and left dogma alone. He remembers her annual anxiety, in the atmosphere of seething competitiveness attending harvest thanksgiving and idly wondering if she believed in God, or had even considered the question, or if divinity even mattered. That had proved a watershed, prompting him to scrutinise his own soul. And all he found, in the place of conviction, was habit. ‘I have doubts,’ he had confessed to her. ‘Don’t you have doubts?’ But Marjory never had doubts, not of that kind. And being in a state of doubt, he went on to explain, was not being in a state of grace, and he refused further to compromise himself by sceptical attendance.

  ‘They’re not all saints.’ She said. ‘I’m sure the C of E is big enough to accommodate doubts.’ She said. ‘Look at Thomas.’

  ‘But he was a saint.’

  She knew when to hector and when to retreat, and the tone of his doubts left her in no doubt. So she visited her priest and word got around. Other husbands might languish at home, in spiritual ignorance, or wash their cars with pagan indifference. That wasn’t the absence of the apostate. She changed her demeanour: Marjory of the husband who had doubts.

  Her stock rose. And then came the fateful day.

  She returned, stiff-legged in shock. Dr Twidell, an unimaginative man wholly dependent on a limited repertoire of patented drugs, appeared as shocked as she was. Drawing forth tonight’s star prize from the buff coloured envelope, unsuspected and imminent death, he steeled himself to deliver the prognosis. The question of remediation was deferred; news of hopelessness could be foisted on the locum when Marjory mustered sufficiently to ask.

  But she never asked. She tottered home between suburban hedgerows and glowing pavements, to sit dazed in the sundrenched lounge as dandelion seeds floated past the bay window, like motes of accountable time, and tried to apprehend the scope of a lifetime that made nonsense of her new shoes. She imagined her accessories, charitable confetti, sprinkled over unappreciative single mothers on a council estate.

  Christopher had to obtain the news from the hapless locum as Dr Twidell sliced on the fourth. His attempts at consoling his wife elicited a snort. He sought reinforcements. The priest made the mistake of an appeal to her spiritual side. A hackneyed attempt to relegate affairs to the context of eternity, of situating this departure in the boundless reunion to come, conjured in Christopher’s mind the horror of a never-ending bridge evening. Who knows what it conjured in hers. She gave another snort and turned her face to the wall. There was no bigger picture, only that framed in the bay: the sun-drenched garden and beyond that the world that callously continued to rotate. She climbed the stairs for the last time, to bury herself among accoutrements that had lost all consolation and value. A week later she suffered a facial palsy, and behind this furious mask raged at Christopher’s superfluous health, as he plumped her pillows and removed the tea tray. This accusatory glare followed him around the room for another week, till she suffered another stroke. He phoned from her room and, turning, noticed the change in her eyes. He sat on the bed and held her hand while the ambulance threaded its way. Behind the mask the moist eyes swivelled in bewilderment and began to leak. She gripped his hand spasmodically, and tried to articulate something. Venom? Affection? Reconciliation? Atonement? A lifetime of getting on, of climbing up, of things and people strategically ignored or cultivated, of things unsaid, boiled down to the travesty of two ambiguous grunts. It appeared that Marjory finally had doubts.

  The congregation was smaller than he expected but select enough to obtain her posthumous approval. Several of the ladies said so. Christopher believed they were impersonating a crowd. He saw the empty pews as an indictment.

  He had been alone for a week when he realised how rigorous her preparations had been, anticipating herself in his role. A cleaning lady called two mornings, and one unpredictable afternoon a week. She had her own key. Dust never settled. The contents of his washing basket emptied itself and fresh shirts appeared, stacked like bricks. Surfaces silently shone. The rumple of bedclothes pulled itself taut. A gardener appeared from the shrubbery. He also had a key, to the shed, and wielded his implements with a pr
oprietorial air. Weeds were as absent from the flower beds as coffee rings from the occasional tables. Order reigned in Marjory’s fiefdom, starting from the garden gate. He felt like a tenant occupying the premises of an absentee landlord. She would have lived in this antiseptic environment with the wherewithal to realise her social ambitions. But she had died, and he had not. Given the modesty of his requirements he found he was sitting on a small volcano of cash, erratically spewing cheques, as policies, long forgotten, matured.

  Despite the self-absorption he had defensively withdrawn into he found he was curiously unprepared for the solitude that fell in lieu of dust. Her ambitions and activities, sometimes the avoidance of them, had been the armature that supported his routine. With her gone, the day sagged. ‘I had ambitions,’ he says to the furniture. ‘I had a life. Why have I allowed this to happen?’ The sterile surfaces reproach with their silence. He knows he did not subordinate his ambitions to hers, they never wanted the same thing. He allowed them to perish.

  ‘I am not poor. I am not unhealthy.’

  If anything is to mean anything he must connect.

  Christopher’s view of history, with extensive if eclectic reading, is of a vista of past atrocities. History is populated with the disgraces of human behaviour: ancient persecutions, mediaeval cruelty, sweeping barbaric hordes, all of these things merely lacking the refinement that advances have now lent that nasty predisposition of certain natures. Membership of the wrong tribe, or no membership at all, has proved fatal. Belief in the wrong thing, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, or even belief in nothing at all has supplied unfortunate people with the credentials to be horribly extinguished in their masses. He sees himself, standing on the pinnacle of the present tense, looking back on a soggy plain. The dry spots are pockets of safety, outnumbered by the morass of cruelty. From his eyrie it’s a ghastly mosaic. In his less jovial moments he has been given to wonder if the aggregate of human history contains more grief than joy, or did people just get by – like him. The trick is to negotiate history dry shod, which is what he’s done, through no effort on his part. He hasn’t been called upon, his mettle hasn’t been tested, which, when he thinks about it, makes him feel a number of things: relief, guilt, and sometimes a vague sense of shame when he has found himself unhappy, well fed and stable, when the television pours out daily grief, and the posthumous chorus of all the countless who got a rawer deal echoes up through the cistern of the past.

  He walks out on the terrace. It’s as dark as it will become. The night has a narcotic stillness. Christopher calculates the junction of both diagonals, takes possession of the long rectangle of the garden, and inspects his strip of metropolitan sky.

  As a child he believed that the space above the garden belonged to his parents, as did the grass on which he stood, that space was carved into allotments and theirs was a column of air, attenuating to a tiny point, like converging rails into a flat horizon. He had tried to make some kind of order on the capricious scattering of stars by studying a children’s astronomy book. Pages as thick as cardboard superimposed creatures and things, linking random points of light. Even then he had thought the selection arbitrary. Those images had faded from memory as their co-ordinates continued to burn. His abiding memory was of poring over these books, the creaking pages balanced on his mother’s lap, during that interval of bed-time intimacy, when she read him to sleep. She furnished what scant commentary her knowledge could provide, inspired by the captions, with almost the same reverential tone she used when instructing him in his prayers. But she also spoke extempore, telling him of the time before telescopes, when people believed the earth was the centre of everything and everything circled round us, like ripples in a pool when you throw a stone, or the concentric skins of an onion. And she told him that these people believed everything was so perfectly balanced in this mechanism that heavenly music came from the harmony of the spheres. It was the simpler explanation that seduced him. How could harmony not envelope us when he had had a foretaste in the drowsy enclosure of his mother’s arms? The evocation of her scent so impregnated his memory that he lived his whole life with the subconscious illusion that the vast distances of space were informed with the smell of lily of the valley, and the resonance of music too beautiful for us to hear.

  * * *

  Christopher has found a dog and lost a cleaner. The discipline of these new days starts with an early morning constitutional round the common, observing the clockwise etiquette of other like-minded individuals. And he is drawn there in the evenings too, by the fragrance of gathering dusk. He can still remember the annual fairs. Now he doesn’t linger longer than the sun, as the place turns sinister in the space of ten minutes. Shouts penetrate the dark, and ponds of lamplight are bisected by hooded teenagers on unlit bikes. It was on such an outing, last week, having outstayed prudence, that he came across the dog sitting dead centre in the lamp light, an aimless bull’s eye. It wasn’t young, or pitifully thin. It wore no collar but gave off a slightly forlorn aura. His hesitating interest was enough of an invitation. He was only alerted to the fact that it was following him by their projected shadows. He turned with no intention of shooing it away. If he took it was he depriving the sinister nocturnal visitors to the common of a mascot? He is debating the point when the sight of its leathery testicles resting on the ground decides him.

  He took it home and fed it some salami. Suddenly drained he raids the linen cupboard to manufacture a nest on the kitchen floor, which the dog occupies for fifteen minutes, before ticking its way up the stairs to lie on the bed across his tired legs. In the eerie half-light he finds his glasses and confronts the dog’s blank retinas, reflecting back the sodium glare from the street beyond. They regard one another unblinkingly for several seconds till he leans forward to tousle its head. The compact is made. They fall into separate dreams.

  The blanket that the dog spurned is lying portentously next to the washing machine, next morning, as Christopher and the dog come down for a late breakfast. Washing is never left in sight, one of the functions, like a healthy digestion, that goes unnoticed below decks. Mrs Griggs enters from the garden with the theatricality of a stage entrance, and stands in pointed stupefaction to labour her point. Mrs Griggs is never in the garden. It’s not her domain. Mrs Griggs is ages with Marjory. By a deft inversion she had succeeded in making him ashamed of being her employer. The quantifiable effects of her dusting and scrubbing made his Civil Service scribblings seem hopelessly speculative. Since Marjory’s death she has appointed herself guardian of the effects. Pretending to link cause to effect, she looks at the dog and picks several hairs from the blanket. The dog walks between them to the sunny terrace and pisses on the shrubs.

  ‘I wouldn’t have no truck with a dog in my house.’ He confronts this with silence. She isn’t satisfied. ‘Not me y’wouldn’t. Not in my house.’

  ‘Yes. But it’s not your house. It’s my house.’ The words seem to come from somewhere else.

  ‘Mrs Fabian wouldn’t have liked it.’

  ‘She’s no longer here to consult.’

  She flinches perceptibly. He relents. She senses the advantage.

  ‘I don’t know about dogs.’

  Is this, he wonders, some kind of litany? It’s a tendency he’s noticed with stupid people, and politicians, to hope to prevail simply by repeating the same thing. With the argument on his side he’s been caught flat-footed before by belligerent perseverance. It was a technique Marjory perfected, assessing which arguments she could win by attrition. Past slights stiffen his resolve.

  ‘If you mean you don’t understand dogs then there’s nothing to understand. I’m not asking you to accept responsibility. I’ll look after him. If you mean you’re unwilling to work in a house with a dog then that’s your prerogative.’

  ‘What d’y’mean?’

  He rubs his eyes, imagining a blackboard syllogism with him pointing: you won’t work in a house with a dog; this house has a dog; you won’t work in this house. Good f
ucking riddance. The last sentence comes as a surprise to him again. She deserves civility.

  ‘Look –’

  ‘You didn’t employ me. She did.’ She points upwards, the bedroom, the firmament, he’s too tired of this conversation to guess. Perhaps, Christopher thinks, she has her own blackboard syllogism: I won’t have no trucks with dogs here; here is a dog; you and the dog will have to go. He has a momentary image of her as the manic housekeeper in Rebecca, returning to find her hysterically clutching Marjory’s artefacts as the burning timbers crash down around her.

  ‘She did take you on. And should you choose to remain, we,’ patting the dog for emphasis, ‘will be glad to have you. If it’s a question of money...’

  ‘It’s not money.’ The tone is almost contemptuous. ‘Yours isn’t the only house needs cleaning. I gave them up. I don’t need to clean anyone’s home. I did it for her.’

  He closes his eyes to rub them again and when he looks up she’s gone. A pair of rubber gloves lie flaccid on the draining board to mark her passing, this pantomime evaporation somehow in keeping with this singularly unreal person.

  Half an hour later he’s at the wine merchant in the high street. A worried glance from the assistant prompts him to leave the dog outside. Marjory’s taste latterly evolved to an occasional glass of gaseous Lambrusco. She mistrusted anything that loosened self-control. She enjoyed disliking this shop, making his browsing a pleasureless affair. He orders a case of white burgundy, another of claret, and delights the assistant by giving him carte-blanche to compose a third. They will be delivered that very afternoon. On impulse he lifts a bottle of Pinot Noir and a box of Coronas from the humidor, another habit Marjory disapproved of. The occasional Christmas gift that escaped her embargo was smoked in the kitchen, crouching beneath the extractor hood, sucking up the perfume of Havana.