‘Shagging tarts in Shatby, that’s all I thought you’d dare to do… oh Noah!’
How had she allowed it to happen? Noah had been scared of her and outwardly conformed to the minimum required of him; he followed orders and never downed his tools in protest, Petula could count the number of arguments they had had on her fingers and toes. But he achieved all of this without ever losing the relaxed and inattentive air of one who was getting his sex elsewhere, she grasped that much. Fear of taking her on deprived him of the means to impose his wishes against her far stronger ones, he could not push it or else he’d lose her; that was their relationship in a strap-line, disappearance was his only way out. Petula just wished he had the style to fake his own suicide. She must face it; their marriage had ended before she realised it and she had probably been single for the best part of the last two decades. Her delusion had been total. Petula tried to laugh out loud but the wheeze she heard was a bitter relative of what she wished to be buoyed by.
‘I wonder if you still care about me?’ Petula asked, addressing the empty chair Noah had last sat in four months before. She had grown far too used to letting him out of her sight; they had probably spent no more than four nights together for the entire year, and then exchanged only cursory greetings. What was mad was that she could have convinced herself that this was an unremarkable way to carry on, and that many ‘happy’ people lived this way!
Petula could sense her contrasts close in on her, nothing stranger to her than the distance between normality and abnormality in the same person; she wanted to follow Noah’s lead and seek liberation elsewhere; she wanted to walk out of the door and find him repentant; she wanted to hunt him down, tear off his goolies and wear them round her neck as a message to his new lovers. She was going to pieces and had to reassemble, so with that heightened sense of evolutionary knowhow, which never failed her, this was exactly what Petula did. She rose, ran her feelings under a cold tap of instant forgetting and squared up to the mirror. Her face was ever so sexily ravaged, but otherwise similar to the one she had been so pleased with the night before. No one would tell the difference. Yes, it was time to make her next move.
Ignoring what an hour ago she could not believe, Petula leafed through the stack of sheets that comprised Noah’s letter, arriving at the page that contained the bottom line. These were the facts most resistant to emotion, the ones that the rest of their lives would hinge upon. Skimming over the columns of figures, financial enticements, and other sops designed to assuage her disappointment at being ditched, Petula homed in on the greatest surprise of all; Noah’s willingness to meet her face-to-face and grant her a divorce:
…if, in spite of all that I have written to persuade you that it is in neither of our interests, you still want a divorce, that is, absolutely insist upon one, which I most assuredly do not want for the many good reasons I have already given, then you shall have your way Petula.
Allow me to surprise you again. I am currently staying in Gales with Royce and will be there for two more days before going to
London, and from London back home, which as you now know, is the Philippine islands. All you have to do is call me before then and ask for what you desire and I’ll contact Jacksons and get them onto it; I give you this chance Petula. I owe you that much, I grant you. I will also be in Shatby concluding some business this afternoon, the 9th.
I knew from the moment I realised I had to do this, that I could never have told you all I have face-to-face, and I’m sure you know why. You know me. But if you wish to see me in the flesh, if just to vent your spleen, I will be at our table at The Elephant’s Nest Hotel where I proposed to you, between the hours of 3pm and 4pm today. If you do decide to come please bear in mind, hard as I know it must be for you, that I have tried to be as kind and reasonable as the situation permits me to be, and that making myself do this, and lay myself open to your hate, has taken all the courage I have, and more. Perhaps, if you do come, after we have discussed the terms of the divorce, we could take a short drive together to some of our old spots? Just a thought. However, Petula, I must make myself clear on this one point; if I neither see or hear from you in these next two days I shall resist a divorce with all my might. I may not be the lion you are but you know that I have my resources and have no wish to see my property needlessly split and devalued to satisfy antiquated and vengeful notions of separation…
And nor, if Petula were to be honest, did she. Being bumped off The Heights, her headquarters and the foundation of her self-belief, held absolutely no appeal at all, with the very unpredictability of divorce and separation, and the potential loss of assets and lawyers’ fees, a game of Russian Roulette she had no wish to enter. However, an arrangement like the one Noah suggested, so like her existing life that it would make no odds to anyone who did not know the truth, was a tasty consolation that need not make any observable difference to life’s surfaces. Indeed, now that she entertained the thought, why should the world discover anything at all? She had hidden far greater secrets than this in her time.
Petula reddened. It did not do to have the law laid down to her by Noah in such maddeningly arrogant and inconsiderate terms, and more importantly, she knew the truth; what he had done and sought to get away with, and so would everyone else in the time it took to tell the first caller. What respect could she hope to attract once the community learnt that despite being cast aside, she was willing to stay on at The Heights, like a wedding dress that had been stored simply because of the bother it had taken to make? A life left shielding her ears and closing her eyes forever; a sight and noise that would never go away? No, to carry on ‘as normal’ was an outrageous suggestion made by a criminal who would escape the shame of living with his crime by having no honour. Stuck as she was, she could not do that.
Petula shook her head at her own perfidy. She must stem this suicidal recourse to pride before something came of it. Of course life ought and had to continue as it was, the outrage committed against her demanded no less. The danger to her reputation could best be met directly by an outrageous lie, or two, or three, or however many it took, so long as no one heard the truth. Yes, people would find something out, but the what of what they would find out was the only thing that counted. And it certainly wouldn’t be a précis of Noah’s letter, whose fate belonged deep in the archives. The account people would be drip fed, incrementally, was a different kind of beast, truer to her feelings, and less faithful to Noah’s actual movements. He had never been any good at getting his version of events out to the general public, a stuttering, faltering fumbler who had meekly accepted her right to speak on his behalf. Which is what she would continue to do, with an added passion. Noah’s self-exile could not have played into her hands any better. With him out of the way there was nothing to stop her from saying that their separation, yes, their separation, had been instigated by her on account of his philandering; in fact, she had banished him, throwing him out and telling him never to darken her door again. Humiliation management of this sort, in which the disaster could be carefully phrased and presented to the world, might alter the meaning of her misfortune completely. What she would lose in absolute pity she could retain in measured sympathy; she was still the wronged woman, though crucially one whose face was saved through bold and forthright decisiveness. Not for her the messy compromises of standing by a proven adulterer, nor the ridicule of the cuckold’s horns; there would be no second chances for Noah, there was only one way to stand up to infidelity and that was to send it back to the Philippines with no return ticket – she could stand for Parliament on that kind of platform!
As ruthlessly neat as her solution was, Petula could still make out the flapping strap of a loose end. A divorce may have been out of the question yet she wanted to punish Noah by making him think one was on the cards; she owed him and her self-respect that much, even if she had no intention of countenancing one. But to her horror, the idea of actually seeing him rendered her physically weak, her stomach rinsed by dread. It made no sen
se: being able to boil Noah in a barrel was just what she thought she would have yearned to do. Instead, and entirely out of character, she was fearful of what a meeting might entail. It was too soon somehow. Petula tapped her finger lightly against her forehead, imagining that it was a woodpecker and her skull a tree.
There, it was there. She could not face Noah because she needed time to disguise her sadness as anger, vulnerability as fury, hurt as scorn. It could not be done at once. The firestorm burning through her was too unpredictable, it could change direction at any turn, leading to a scene that may compromise her; a tearful break down or sobbing pleas to come home; anything was possible. Noah had her at his mercy, and acknowledging how was terrible: Petula could understand why he had done it and gone and left her – would she not leave herself if she could? By tomorrow she would have forgotten and replaced this insight with recriminatory self-justification, but at that moment, and maybe for the rest of the day, she saw things as Noah did. This admission, tied to the practical difficulty of raising the prospect of a divorce, when Noah was in a position to call her bluff and actually make one happen, rendered any meeting a strategic nightmare. To run from him, though, was unthinkable; she would never be able to take herself seriously again, and crucially, she would lose the only hold she still had over Noah; his fear of her. But to gaze back into his grey eyes? No. There had to be a solution… some way, or one she could turn to create the confusion needed to halt the flow and claw back the initiative.
There was a quick volley of forceful knocks at the door, followed by a long unbroken hammering characteristic of Petula’s closest neighbour, her son.
‘Jazzy!’
The noise accelerated and stopped, a scraped about-turn and gravel crunching under the sound of heavy work boots, the force of their tread purposefully ground down to emphasise the agony of every step.
Petula chuckled giddily, her relief deliciously sweet to taste. ‘Oh Jazzy, your time has come at last, Pegasus, my winged messenger!’
What better way of looking like she could not accept reality than sending Jazzy out as her special envoy, charged with telling Noah that she was too angry to see him? Jazzy was guaranteed to make a mess of his errand which was exactly what she wanted. In ignoring Noah’s terms, and announcing that his mother demanded a divorce and expected him at The Heights with his lawyers by the end of that week, Jazzy was as good as helping Noah onto the next plane. Cast as an unlikely saviour, his presence at The Elephant’s Nest in her place was the best way of saving her self-respect, frustrating Noah’s attempt to impose his terms with her consent, and leaving her free to pull herself together and counterattack. If this meant she was ‘stuck’ with an arrangement identical to the one outlined in his letter, so much the better, though Noah would never know that, leaving her proudly above the fray! This was more like it!
Petula navigated her way round the strewn files and scattered photographs to the window, and pulled it open. Briskly, she stuck her head out and closed her eyes, sensitive to nature at its most supportive. Spring was speaking the urgent language of regeneration, birds she did not know the names of working in cooperation with one another to feather their nests, their circular calls doing much to reassure her. Even if she were living through a period she would look back on as hell, somewhere a pair of lovers were waking up to an era they would remember as the best of their lives. Petula wished them luck, whoever they were, liking herself much more than normal for doing so.
Drawing back into the room, she glanced at her watch; no time to prepare. This would be a performance in the finest traditions of heartfelt improvisation, the one marker to never lose sight of being that her intended target was human too, however far ahead his start was. Flinging on a wispy grey cardigan and grabbing her cane, Petula bounced stiffly down the passageway to the front door, lifted the latch, and progressed over the sunlit threshold of her empire. The brightness was obliteratingly pure.
‘Even on your best day your shit is just as weak as mine my love,’ she huffed, her agony still inches behind the grim and somewhat sad smile she had forced across her face, her squinting eyes dribbling a watery saltiness she quickly thumbed away.
Jazzy had been in a tolerably good mood until he noticed his mother following him down the track, gaining ground in a way that suggested she had something to tell him. His own reasonable spirits were based on his latest piece of news; he had been accepted on an upholstery course by the local sixth form college, a desire that had become a somnambulant obsession for him these past eighteen months. It was the third evening class that had accepted him in that time. Inheriting his mother’s panache for transference, albeit on a humbler scale, he sought to pretend that he was responding to her nagging, slugging up to The Heights to grumpily announce another activity he had enrolled on, while privately revelling in the thrill of accomplishment. However, the sight of his mother advancing at an eager pace awoke old fears, and like a police car passing a reformed criminal, Jazzy reflexively feared the worst from her approach.
Petula noticed her son’s brow darken and waved her cane gamely. She did not want to frighten him off. At times like this she knew she had drawn her children too deeply into her warring ideology, siring a pack of Frankenstein’s monsters who had swallowed, inverted and intensified their maker’s mark to an imbalanced extent. All their hatreds and prejudices were her own, but too defining of their being and inattentive to that pragmatic moderation required in a war where not every attack could be frontal assault. Fear and anger, which for her were the telescopic sights she saw the world through, in themselves constituted the world itself, threatening to bubble and boil out of control in Jazzy and Evita; Regan choosing to shudder to death in the cold on terms equally as extreme. Admittedly the minute they abandoned their genetic inheritance and toned things down, Petula suffered a different kind of apprehension – they were no use to her if they became wholly individual entities, no longer bound by the matriarchal traditions they shared in common. Her task was to maintain their aggressive posture while being careful to not release them for the kill. When in years to come Petula read of how Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence played the Taliban off the United States she recognised kindred spirits, sad to acknowledge that they had managed their game far better than she.
‘Hullo there, Jazz! Hold up, stop. Something serious has come up, extremely so. For all of us. You have to hear this.’
Jazzy scratched his mottled chin sceptically, halting his legs though still moving quickly away with his eyes. ‘I told you I’d replace that lawnmower, didn’t I? Don’t know what happens with that catch, every time, but it doesn’t click properly, right? There’s no spark… but it wasn’t me that broke it.’
‘This is serious,’ insisted Petula, badly out of breath, ‘red alert okay? You must listen to me.’
Looking worried, Jazzy offered, ‘You know that course in Richmond, right, remember me telling you, to fix the old sofas? I’m on it, they accepted me.’
Petula grimaced sympathetically, seeing that Jazzy was trying to fend off what he believed would be an attack. His conscientious effort to find a craft he excelled in had won her pity; she knew he could not succeed, but watching him reminded her of when he was a little boy trying to walk. There was a living, vital sweetness in his making an effort that was, nearly though not quite, as attractive as attainment, and she admired the quality all the more from knowing that one more failure would probably kill it for good.
‘That’s great, really, but we have to talk properly about this other thing, you have to hear me out…’
‘Yeah, but with the bookbinding and fieldcraft courses I’m on, which together makes three, right? With all of them I could go back and do A-levels if I wanted…’
Petula nodded impatiently, her pain recent enough for her to control the desire to cut Jazzy short, a sensitivity to all suffering the moral outcome of her own.
‘See, with more qualifications, right, the whole bottom line for me changes, aye, I enter the rat race at a whole
new different level, for sure, that’s a given,’ he tilted his head for emphasis, ‘but like it or not, you got to play the game, right? And I can take the extra, no worries, grafting’s no problem, you know what I’m like, I graft and graft…’
At least he would have some help, Petula thought, now that Jill had flaked into the night without so much as a ‘Dear John’ note to thank the family for five years of rent-free living. Her replacement, Spider, who in actual fact resembled a grazing bison, was an improvement in several respects, even though Jazzy wrongly feared she would be a slither too far down the social slope for his mother, her turquoise tattoos and chunky forearms anything but demi-monde. Jazzy would have been correct if Petula still judged her son by her own standards, but she had long ceased to, using Jazzy’s own stunted yardstick to measure matters. With its help, she discerned that Spider was a loyal, stubborn log, who would sooner shave her armpits than welch on the man who had given her and her children a home. All three of her rotund freckly tykes, the fruit of some earlier tryst, amused Petula greatly; they were cheery, observant boys who would wag their tails if they could grow them, following her Range Rover up and down the drive like young Masai on safari. This new family had curtailed Jazzy’s drinking and self-pity, if not his marijuana use, and their kitchen still reeked of wacky flapjacks and cookies, in much the same way as his years of bitter self-righteousness had mellowed into a not-quite-convincing stoicism. And despite the presence of children, no one could call Petula ‘Grandma’ yet, a prospect Jazzy had disqualified her from when he had demanded a vasectomy as ‘the world’s too dangerous to bring any more little ones into’. As far as Petula was concerned, so long as his brood’s population had peaked, and kept its distance, they, their house, and her increasingly infrequent contact with her son, were part of a history that had moved through harm to harmlessness, distinguished largely by its lack of prominence in her life. But Noah’s flight had changed these comforting assumptions, upsetting years of stability, and necessitated the creation of an on-the-spot deputy.
Nature and Necessity Page 37
