‘She thought a real tree caused a mess.’
‘A real mess, with a real smell. Marjory didn’t go in much for anything that didn’t suit her, did she?’
‘I don’t suppose so.’
He comes home one evening to a neon reindeer in the front garden, encouraged by a flashing Santa. Deborah and Oscar will take it in the spirit it’s intended, but it will apoplex some of the other neighbours. Marjory would have died. That’s probably why she did it. He goes in. She has been to Woolworths. The hall is a tacky grotto. A real tree dominates the front room.
‘Good – isn’t it?’ She is animated over dinner. He is quiet.
‘What’s the matter with you?’
‘Nothing. All this,’ waving towards the hall and the tinsel she has hung above the pictures, ‘do you believe it?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘I think it does.’ He remembers midnight mass with his mother; her squeeze of his hand on the stroke of the hour; the candles, the uplit faces, the hymns, the goodwill on the steps afterwards, bathed in a flowing out of grace from the lighted church behind; greetings in the cold air to the same people, somehow renewed in the mystery. ‘Either it’s just a bunch of ornaments and over spending adding up to nothing, or they’re the garland round the real reason: “The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor”.’
‘What’s that?’
‘A poem describing the scene in the stable.’
‘Oh that.’
Yes, he thinks, that, and everything it implies. And he has wanted to believe it ever since he didn’t, a birth that tilted the world.
‘I don’t think it does matter. And I don’t think it’s all just ornaments and overeating. Even if there was no stable and even no baby, where’s the harm if it makes people a bit nicer to one another for a couple of days? There’s the rest of the year for folk to be complete bastards. Think of all those coins dropped in all those boxes just because it’s Christmas.’
And he thinks in a way she’s right, the same way he’s not wrong. And this Christmas he has her.
‘And it’s a time for families’ he concedes, colossally hitting the wrong note. He’s thinking of separated people given a reason not to drift further from one another, but she has interpreted this in some way that twists her mouth again as she frowns at her food. He has a sense of telescoping, seeing his predicament from afar, last experienced when confronted with another casual revelation of Marjory’s smallness. They are an old man and a young woman of slender acquaintance in a suburban kitchen, one light in the hundreds of thousands in the humming conurbation. He is the last of his line. Since the death of his mother this is the nearest thing he has experienced to a family, and it’s not real. He has conjured this because he wanted it, perhaps at some level even still needed it. His casual remark has distressed her and he doesn’t know how to make amends, because he realises how little he knows her.
‘There’s fruit salad,’ she says, listlessly.
On Christmas morning he wakes to a vacant silence. The dog lies across his legs wearing a sparkling collar that wasn’t there when he followed Christopher to bed. He taps her door to no reply. The delicatessen is closed. The folded scarf on the hall table has a premonitory weight. Her house keys fall from its folds. The kitchen is clinically clean, with none of the aftermath of last night’s meal. There are precise written instructions concerning the half-prepared Christmas dinner, but no note about anything else. He takes the dog out, scrambles some eggs, sits in front of the television and regards the wrapped presents beneath the tree. The dog makes intermittent trips to the hall and back, looking for her. Deborah comes through around lunch time with presents.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t think to buy for you.’
‘Gina did. She delivered them yesterday. Where is she?’
‘She’s gone back to Scotland... I think.’
Deborah absorbs this, pauses in the delivery of her next question and decides not to ask. ‘I’ll leave the presents beneath the tree, shall I?’
‘Yes. If you don’t mind. I’m not opening my stuff just yet.’
‘We’re eating in two hours. There’s tons.’
‘There’s tons here too. She left me instructions.’
‘The offer’s there. There’s no need to be on your own.’
‘Thank you.’ She kisses him.
But he is on his own. He sets the oven and times the steps as indicated. She’s been meticulous in her instructions but hasn’t halved the quantities. A single ironic cracker has been left out. He leaves the television at a low murmur, to give the illusion of human communion. The meal is joyless. He takes the dog out again after dark and mimes a hearty greeting to the boys next door as they wave to him from the front room. Jacob holds up a glass of beer and beckons him in. Christopher points to the dog and in the direction of the common, and walks off before the invitation can be repeated from the front hall. He returns from the opposite direction to avoid their hospitality and stumbles over the darkened reindeer.
He cracks some nuts for the sound of the detonation and then decides he doesn’t want them. At the sound of the front door his heart stutters. A series of contradictory thoughts shuttle back and forth at a speed that outpaces his physical reactions. Why would she ring if she has a key? She doesn’t – it was in the scarf. She’s returned? Was she ever away? Was this an excursion? He yanks open the door to find Vanessa in the same pose as the barbecue evening, with the same crepe-wrapped bottle and a present under her arm.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing. No, please, please.’ He waves her in with a magnanimity he doesn’t feel. The dog looks at her and is disappointed. She walks into the kitchen and surveys the remains of his meal, the solitary cracker. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t think to get you a present.’
‘Gina did. She handed it in yesterday.’
‘That was thoughtful.’
‘Where is she anyway?’ This obviously isn’t the time for exchanging presents. She puts hers on the floor and nudges it with her foot towards the skirting.
‘I don’t know. She didn’t say. Her thoughtfulness seems to have been all used up seeing to presents.’ It’s uncharacteristically peevish. She sits, still in her coat, looking at him intently. ‘Excuse me for forgetting my manners. Have you eaten?’
‘Yes. But I’ll have a glass of wine.’
He pours them both a glass and sits opposite her. ‘Would you like me to take your coat?’
She shrugs it off and leaves it hanging on the back of the chair, arms trailing. She’s about to ask if he has called the police when she realises the absurdity of it. And say what? A girl he has been looking after and about whom he knows next to nothing may or may not have decided to leave. She wonders if he appreciates how uncomfortable the attention focused on his relationship with Gina would make him. She is fairly sure that since Gina came to stay here he has become more of a cause celeb among their little tribe than she imagines she is. She also knows the decency of his intentions have shielded him from knowing any of this. Even at this age he’s still reluctant to believe that other people can be otherwise motivated. Considering the length of time he was exposed to Marjory she thinks this makes him either a fool or a hopeless idealist. His look of baffled concern makes him strangely childlike. Her feeling flows towards him like lava.
‘Are you going to go and look for her?’
‘She hasn’t been away for long enough yet.’
‘If it gets to the time when she has been, will you look?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you want me to come?’
‘I don’t know. I shouldn’t expect so. I wouldn’t drag you traipsing all round the place because I’m disappointed in someone’s behaviour.’
‘When people say ‘If there’s anything I can do’ they don’t mean literally anything. They mean if there’s anything I can do within reason given the extent of our friendship.’
‘I know. I’ve got cards from Marjory’s churchy stalwar
ts to prove it. Or at least I had.’
‘If there’s anything I can do. If you go and you want me to go, I will. If it will help lessen it, I’ll share a disappointment. If you need me to look after the dog then say so.’ She finishes the wine with a glug, stands, slides her arms back into the coat sleeves and shrugs the coat back on. ‘If you need to look, and you want to do it on your own, I’ll be here when you get back. Stay where you are. I can see myself out.’
By eight o’clock he is in his pyjamas, still poring over her cavalier departure, wondering why she had set so little store in what had come to matter to him. By nine o’clock he is angry at her for having disrupted the equilibrium it took him so long to establish, for avoiding the ordeal of a proper goodbye. At the very least she owed him that. He had not taken her for a coward. At the dog’s insistent scratching he lets it into the back garden. The kitchen light reflects from the shrouded dome of the barbecue, glistening blackly in the pattering drizzle. The dog completes a futile round of the shrubbery, looking for her, until Christopher summons him indoors. Despite the day’s inactivity the turbulence has exhausted him. He climbs the stairs leaving the dishes behind.
He wakes with a profound sense of worry. His dreams have been a catalogue of destitute scenarios. He knows so little about her, how can he be sure her motives were selfish? There may be some compulsion he doesn’t know about. She may have been forced back to something sinister. She didn’t say she wasn’t coming back because she didn’t say anything.
The shop is open tomorrow. Should he phone to see if she gave notice to quit or go on holiday? What’s the point? He believes that she cares more for him than the job, and if she’d leave him without notice why would she tell the shop? She still has a coat on the hall stand. There is a greyness to everything that can’t be attributed just yet to the return of dust. She has taken the colour with her. He stands outside her room and, ridiculously, knocks. He pushes the door open and stands on the threshold, peering in, as if hoping to divine something from the arrangement of the furniture.
It’s tidy and doesn’t show any signs of impulsive departure. There are clothes still hanging in the closet, but he doesn’t know if this is a good sign or not: whatever she’s taken with her is more than she arrived with. She’s obviously used to travelling light. On her bedside is a book of Yeats’ poems, taken from the shelves downstairs that she brought up here following his reference to the stable. Various of his other books litter other surfaces. She has pored over these over the months, when he has mentioned something she knew nothing about. Whatever haunts her, there is more than one hunger there. He didn’t know his words carried this weight.
He hesitates at her bedside bureau. But he has come this far. It yields nothing unexpected. There is no money, which, he decides, is not a good sign. The chest of drawers has a rationale he can understand: socks and balled up tights in the bottom drawer, the others working their way up the body. The middle drawer has a confusion of pastel bras and flimsy things that pass for pants. He closes this quickly and looks over his shoulder, as if expecting to be caught. The top drawer contains jumpers, various tops and the acrylic scarf he derided. He picks this up with a static crackle. Beneath is a shoe box. He looks at this, blinking for a few seconds, sensing something portentous. He takes it to the bed and sits down, staring at it for a silent minute. This is a further intrusion, but he’s already seen her underwear drawer. It may only be receipts.
But it isn’t. It’s a collection of photographs, dozens, perhaps more than a hundred, thrown in in any order. The box is battered. She must have had this with her all the time. He never noticed. He tips the contents out, turning them face upward and fanning them over the counterpane, trying to achieve some kind of perspective. The largest portion are the postage-stamp booth photographs with the same subject: two girls, individually or in combination, their faces laughingly vying with one another to command space. Every close of the shutter has caught the spontaneity and affection. They can be easily categorised by age, not just because of the transformation of the subjects, but because of the photographs themselves, dogeared, dubiously tinted by obsolete processes, faded with time and coated with a patina of handling. Gina is obvious, the woman he has spent the past months with emerging from the adolescent face that assumes a look of humorous gravity, and a wistfulness when photographed on her own.
The other girl is a mystery to him. She undergoes a marked transformation. In the earlier photographs she is the same colour as Gina. There isn’t a great distinction in their development. Their paths diverge as Gina shades into gamine. The fullness of the other girl’s face is obviously part of a growing voluptuousness, made more obvious by another photograph where she bolsters her cleavage to present it to the lens like merchandise, one eyebrow raised as if appraising the viewer. Gina is a blur of hilarity in the background as she is edged out the picture. Perhaps this was for the boys. He is useless with ages, but looking at Gina he would guess they are around fourteen or fifteen. He can imagine her boy-like figure in contrast to the other.
The other girl is already changing colour. It can’t be attributed to some quirk in the chemical development, because it doesn’t happen to Gina and it’s consistent. They can’t all have been taken from the same booth. She begins to glow as she fills out. In one of the last ones her face is obscured by a turban of intensely thick smoke, suspended above the tangerine delta of her impressive cleavage.
And then there are other dual booth photographs in which she doesn’t figure. Here is Gina, an animated version of the young woman he knows, holding up a baby for the preservation of the moment, again and again, in different backing, in different clothes, raising a mittened hand, laughing, pretending to scowl, smiling at the baby with an intensity of directed love that’s more palpable than the cosmetic glow of the orange girl. From the elaborate outfits he assumes the baby is a girl.
There are other pictures too, dozens, taken beyond the confines of the booths. The girls at the bottom of what looks like a gangplank, everything beyond the pool of the flash in darkness, Gina, vulnerably young, pulling a coat around her, shoulders raised, hunched in the obvious cold; the other, seemingly oblivious in glowing décolletage, as they snort tusks of air in shared mirth. The baby in a swing, craning backward to smile back at Gina. Who is the photographer? Perhaps the orange girl who appears with Gina in a corner café booth, the baby bolstered in a high chair between. But then who is the photographer here? A stilted shot in a shabby room, flooded with daylight, a glimpsed bend of a river from a floor-length window behind. He guesses this is done on auto timer from the contrivance of the arrangement. Gina stands between two girls her own age, the orange one and another nondescript girl, the latter self-consciously contemplating her shoes while the other two stare out confidently, down the corridor of time to this perusal.
There are more of the same that yield nothing new. The baby grows in increments at each exposure and is eventually seen walking in the same shabby room, one foot raised in preparation for the next haphazard step, a disembodied hand hovering.
For all these photographs he pores over there is so little subject matter beyond what he sees again and again. How was her world populated? He wonders if a search through his photographs would be more edifying. At least you would be able to glimpse his antecedents. There would be his mother and father, and further back moustachioed Edwardian men and corseted women. At the bottom of the box is a small purse with a miscellany of things whose significance is lost on him: a bus ticket to somewhere called Cathcart, a card from a Glasgow trattoria, a much crumpled final demand utility bill, which he laboriously flattens beneath the angle poise, hands trembling, for its redemptive address.
* * *
The dog wants to sit beside him, is dissuaded, investigates the farrago of smells beneath the seat, accommodates himself to the movement and sways in tandem with Christopher above. He has confused the train times, the way he feels he has confused a number of things since her departure. He didn’t realise t
ill she had gone how many small things he depended on her for. Sunset is earlier than he anticipated. He envisaged some friendly metropolis, gilded with winter sunset and the incipient spirit of Hogmanay, and now he feels they are racing the fading light and haven’t crossed the border yet. Like Dracula he has never been north of Whitby. He feels a sense of growing apprehension as colour drains from the passing scenery.
Above his head is a small bag with two changes of underwear and socks, some toiletries, another shirt and the dog’s worming tablets, the last snatched up on a whim. The dog no longer has worms. He was at a loss what to pack because he doesn’t know how long he will stay, or where, or what kind of reception he will meet if he even succeeds in finding her. His imagination has run the gamut of reactions he might or might not elicit: relief, reproach, anger, indifference, tearful apologies – he simply doesn’t know. In his wallet is a sample photograph of the four faces who recurrently appeared on the scattered bedspread. The picture of her is superfluous: she is one of the indelibles on his fly-paper memory. The orange girl will identify herself. Even if the colour has faded the remarkable bosom won’t have. The third girl always appears to be making for the periphery of the pictures in an attempt to rub herself out. He isn’t confident he can identify her. The picture of the baby is the latest of the available selection, poised at the apex of her swing, gleeful, scant hair flying. Or is she an infant? When do they qualify? Does it matter? What age is she now? Will she have changed beyond recognition? The questions are hitting him like hail. What is he thinking, that some photo-fit family of miscellaneous parts held in his speeding wallet is awaiting his recognition? How stupid is that?
He forces down the corrosive doubts and looks out the window. The border has come and gone. With no announcement he is in the darkened Scottish lowlands. Individual lights wink in the gloom and he imagines secluded farmhouses, the terminus of inaccessible roads, whose warm interiors smell of leather, dogs and tobacco. Rural station signs, rendered a blur by the speed of the express, flit past, the train threading lights in the darkness. The stations become less intermittent and more comprehensible as they slow. The impatient gather their wares and stand redundantly in the aisle. And now they are sliding past the inevitable periphery of all cities: dormant rail stock on sidings, arc-lit construction sites, the monotonous catalogue of darkened factories, the glare of a retail park with its quilt of cars. A river arrives, leafless branches of bordering trees festooned with Christmas lights, doubled in the water, dark as oil. They slide across. The train finally stops, the dog emerging at the pneumatic hiss of the doors and the smell of food and commerce it admits. He lets them all disperse before gathering the fragments of resolution that propelled him here, collects his overhead bag and the dog, and steps off. It is a wrought iron Victorian emporium dotted with concession stands. The revellers outnumber the rest, or seem to in advertising their enjoyment. There is singing down the concourse and beyond the exit. The cold is aggressive.
Four New Words for Love Page 15
