Glover's Mistake

by Nick Laird

  Around about one

  I carried you

  When David awoke on Sunday, Ruth and Glover had already left. He walked listlessly through Borough market, stopping at stalls to try the morsels on cocktail sticks, and bought nothing. The place was filled with couples holding hands and wearing scarves and paying twenty quid for geometric hunks of cheese. He wandered home and blogged about how shit the market had become. He was involved in four arguments—on a film blog, a poetry forum, the International Women Arts website and a newspaper comment section—and he posted new replies. He chatted to Singleton online but then she had to go to see friends. She’d suggested, very casually, that they could meet for a drink but he hadn’t really taken her up on it. Nor had they swapped photographs yet. He felt uneasy about setting himself before her, for judgement, for review, and he was sure she felt the same. He lay on the sofa for an hour, imagining lines he might use when Ruth or Glover eventually called, when the email from Kimberley eventually surfaced. It had been released into the system; it was waiting, primed, in Larry’s inbox. David couldn’t believe there were people who went a whole weekend without checking their email, but it wasn’t until the Monday morning, as he stood in the staff room at 11 a.m., waiting for the coffee to percolate, that his mobile rang. ‘James-Mob’ flashed on the screen.

  ‘Ruth knows.’ He sounded piteous. ‘Kimberley sent her an email. Can you believe she sent her an email?’

  David stepped out into the corridor. ‘Oh shit. I didn’t mention it, but she’s been asking about you. Last week she stopped me after class and said Rosie wanted your number. I told her you were engaged to a friend.’

  Glover’s breathing was hoarse. He cursed, gave a short moan, sniffed several times.

  ‘It’s going to be all right,’ David said soothingly. Whether, in fact, this was true now lay within his power. Glover had called the right man.

  ‘I think I’ve still got Rosie’s number somewhere,’ Glover said. ‘When I get back I’m going to ring her and find out why the fuck she’s doing this.’

  ‘You have her number? I thought you erased it.’

  ‘She wrote it on the invite.’

  David slid this info to the back of his mind before moving on to the little speech he’d prepared. ‘I almost feel responsible. I’ve talked about Ruth’s work in class, she had the name and I suppose—’

  ‘And that’s the other thing.’ There was a pause. ‘She sent it to Larry. Ruth thinks the whole gallery’s read it. I’ve humiliated her.’

  Silence again. So much depends on what people believe about the texture of a silence. Then Glover began to cry; softly, tenderly, a mourner who knows the dead are dead and can’t be helped by tears. Finally he stopped and sighed, and murmured, ‘I sabotaged myself.’

  It hurt David to hear him like that; he assured him again that it would all be fine. Friendship is full of these economies with the truth. A little theory: just as artists would rather have imperfect knowledge of their art (that is, they’d rather think their art is perfect), so we would all rather be loved for what we seem to be. For Glover, it was the end of‘seeming’, and David felt strongly that his tears had the flavour of a liberation, though he knew he would not thank him for it.

  Ringing Rosie, obviously, could not be allowed to happen. It would transpire that she hadn’t known her sister was going to write to Ruth, and then it would transpire that her sister had done nothing of the sort. David had a free period before lunch and he hurried to Oxford Circus and caught the tube home.

  First he tried the pockets of Glover’s jackets that were hanging in the hallway, but turned up only loose coins and receipts. Glover always closed his bedroom door when he was leaving the flat. David didn’t think it was, particularly, to keep him out: he was just that kind of person, a drawer-shutter, a turner-off of lights. He knocked lightly, even though he knew that Glover was in the Bell. His room was much tidier than David’s: the inch-too-short blue curtains were drawn back and the white duvet had been smoothed out, creaseless as icing. He tugged the wardrobe open and went through the jeans folded on the shelf. Two almost-empty packets of gum. What had he been wearing? His brown leather blazer, battered and scuffed like some seventies pimp’s, was hanging on the back of his door. In the inside pocket David’s fingers met stiff card and he pulled out the invite—The End of Mocks! All Aboard the SS Carolina! On the back, neat in red ink, a phone number and Rosie.

  David smiled at himself in the wardrobe mirror, then sat down on the edge of the bed. A spring in the mattress emitted a short resonant belch, and for a minute he stayed very still, listening to the nearest thing to silence London had to offer. The fridge hummed in the kitchen. Traffic sounds rose and fell. Someone was shouting very loudly and very far away. Carefully, he lowered himself down onto his back.

  So this was the view from here, from his bed, from his pillow. This is what it was like to be Glover.

  Here was his Artex ceiling, the cream paper globe of his lampshade. David turned his head to the right and here was his wall: magnolia, matt, bumpily plastered. To the left, here were his photographs, his books, his clothes; and here was something else, his smell. In the mornings, after one of his lengthy baths or showers, he’d slope into the kitchen redolent of milk-and-honey shower gel. By the evening, though, or after he’d come back from the pub, under the smell of stale beer and ash there was a hint off him of forest, timber, sap. And now it came from his pillow. David inhaled again. Was Ruth’s perfume in there? Some part per million of the atmosphere suggested her, a citrus sweetness somewhere. Maybe he imagined it. He heard a noise and sat up quickly. A pigeon, plump and sleek, had landed on the windowsill. It swivelled an unblinking eye towards him, jerked its plush head twice and dropped from sight. Where was its collective noun, David thought, its group, its flock, its kind?

  On top of the three wine boxes Glover had stacked by the bed sat a framed picture of Glover and Ruth on a deserted, freezing beach. Already there were photographs; already there was hard evidence. The camera must have been on self-timer and placed on a soft sand sign or a life-ring box. Glover’s hair was plastered to his forehead and Ruth’s cheekbones were pinkish, scrubbedlooking. He stood squarely, facing the camera in his black anorak, while she wore his blood-red cagoule, and was pretending to climb him, her leg raised to his thigh and her arms around his chest, like one of those vines that grows up its host tree, eventually strangling it. The sky behind them was pale as paper, the sea a band of wet cement beneath it, and a haze of light rain scumbled the scene. In one corner the picture was flecked where the lens had been hit by a raindrop. Despite the weather, they wore huge foolish grins. David knew it was Norfolk, though it looked like the edge of the world.

  A few weeks before, they’d come in from the cinema to find David slumped in an armchair, browsing through an old National Trust handbook, cracking pistachios and trying very hard to be nice. When he reached for the remote control on the coffee table, to turn down the volume, he upset the bowl of empty shells he’d balanced on his stomach. As he trawled the depths of the armchair for the last remaining bits, Ruth had leafed through the handbook and lightly mooted the idea that we should take a weekend away somewhere. A few days later David heard Glover on the phone telling Tom he needed the weekend off. When Glover came into the kitchen afterwards David was making an omelette. He asked if they could borrow the Polo, and David realized that his fears had come true: the we did not include him. They spent three days rattling down the hedgewalled C-roads of East Anglia, treading across the drawing rooms of dying mansions, and taking photographs on wet deserted beaches. Although they filled the petrol tank, there was sand in the creases of the car seats and all over the foot mats. Glover had returned on the Monday night when David was watching EastEnders, having dropped Ruth at the Barbican. He asked him whether they’d called in on his parents and Glover grinned.

  ‘I don’t think Ruth would have been up for that, and they’d probably have been out anyway…’

  David set the
photo back on the wine boxes and spotted that the drawer of the wooden bedside table was open a little. He pulled it out a few inches further. Towards the back was an Auto Trader and on top of it sat Glover’s Bible. When he touched a Bible, David liked to say, he wanted to go and wash his hands. Bound in black leather, it had several ribbons marking places in its gilt-edged pages. It was tagged and highlighted and as dog-eared as an exam text, which of course it was. Paperclips like knots upset the straight grain of the pages, bookmarks peeped from the ends and sides. David pulled out a bookmark that featured the story of the man who is looking back over the journey of his life. He sees two sets of footprints and notices that, during the most testing periods, one of the sets disappeared. He asks God, who as it happens is standing beside him, what it means, why He abandoned him when things were at their worst. God replies Those were the times that I carried you.

  David flicked through the Good Book and the tiny breeze from the turning pages made him blink. A starchy smell came off it. There was something desperate and saddening about Glover sitting in here among his cricket almanacs and National Geographics, underlining mad and ancient rules to live by. Glover was so young. David thought of Shylock: I hate him for he is a Christian. He turned to the glued-in frontispiece and read:

  To James, Happy 16th Birthday Darling, Love Mummy and Dad xxx

  As he laid the Bible back in the drawer he noticed a loose sheet poking out from under the Auto Trader. It was a quick pencil sketch of a face—the heavy brow, the almost feminine jawline—and yet it couldn’t be anyone but Glover. David was amazed at how few lines it took to replicate someone. It needed just the barest adumbration. Evolution takes the shortest route and our most remarkable ability is picking out. We learnt to piece together moving specks of colour in the canopy and resolve them into creature, into enemy or prey. We see faces in the clouds, make gods in our own image. Ruth had signed the sketch with a swollen R. David set it back, under the motoring bible and the real one, pushed the drawer shut and thought how he should really leave for school.

  On entering the living room though, he let himself collapse on his back on the lumpy sofa beneath the window. It was a bright cold afternoon and the curtains were half-drawn. The room was sliced with shadow and light. He patted the folded invite in the pocket of his shirt and felt content, swollen and sated by the two packets of prawn sandwiches he’d wolfed down on the tube. Let’s see what happens now, he thought. There was no way Ruth would be able to bear the shame, at least not alone, and he would be there for her. He lay completely motionless and watched the dust ride in and out of the pilastered sunlight. It was like the smoke that wreathed his father in the glass box of his porch. It flittered, hovered, hung like plankton; and when he pursed his lips and blew, it scattered. He thought how every time he spoke these particles and fibres were being driven and dispersed before him, and he was entirely unconscious of it. Perhaps these tiny specks could be resolved as well, could be pieced together into…For the split of a second he found himself thinking, Is it really so improbable that God exists? The sunlight was warm on his hands and his face, and he remembered how faith felt, how cosy it could be, how collective and safe; then the moment passed.

  He locked up and walked to the station quickly, stopping outside the entrance. He slipped the ticket for the boat party out of his pocket and tore it in half, then in half again, and tossed the pieces into the mouth of the litter bin. If there is a God, David thought, why the fuck should it not be me?

  That afternoon, between lessons, he tried to ring Ruth, but her phone was turned off. He heard nothing from either of them until the following morning. When he logged on and signed in at 8.07 a.m., there was an email from Ruth, eleven minutes old, tersely stating that she knew now and wasn’t angry with him for not telling her. They were ‘going to try to work through it’. After checking the Kimber1986 account—she hadn’t replied to it—he decided to phone her.

  ‘Oh, hey David.’

  Her voice was blowsy with reverb: she was already in her studio.

  ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t know what to do. I was caught in the middle. Do you want me to come over?’

  ‘Of course not, no one died. I’m fine, really.’

  ‘Oh, come on, it’s me. You can’t just be fine.’

  She sighed, releasing some of her real self. ‘Oh, I don’t know…In a way I’m relieved. I’d been thinking that it wasn’t realistic—’

  ‘Realistic?’ David couldn’t help it. She was refusing to take this personally. He held his dressing gown closed and put his head out into the hallway. Glover’s door was open, the room empty. He must be at Ruth’s, still asleep in that king-sized bed in the sky.

  ‘Look, obviously I’m embarrassed about it. Larry had to forward the damn thing to me and I know the girls at the gallery have read it. And I’m annoyed that this girl—that these sisters—have come into my life in some way, and I guess I’m upset, but, you know, I’m almost pleased. It’s sick, I know. I want us to stand a chance of being happy and you have to be realistic…I know it sounds crazy but I want James to be with me, not resent me, not find marriage some constricting obligation. He’s only twenty-three…’

  David thought of Kafka, finding new sources of pleasure in his own abasement. Another sigh and she said nothing for a moment. He responded in kind, and she spoke first, as he’d known she would.

  ‘People want, David. It’s what they do. They’re machines that run on desire. We just have to deal with that as best we can. And James needs to have experiences. I never thought of monogamy as a condition of marriage. Really, it’s just what happens…’

  So it went. She kept talking and David went about his morning routine—the things he had to do before he went out to the world of work she could never imagine, a world she was privileged not to have known. Ruth was free of that, of the stain of utility. But that makes it sound as if her privileges were only of the kind defined by class, and as he put the phone on the sink and splashed water on his face, listening to her self-justifications on the loudspeaker, David saw that this was much too limited a vision.

  There is no privilege as great as that enjoyed by those ‘To Whom Things Come Easily’. Class is a part of it; talent is a part also; sometimes, as it was with Glover, dumb pretty looks will do the job. They are anointed with luck. They don’t make it. There is no effort. There is little danger of fragmentation, of personal destruction. Since they are accustomed to getting, to having, the risk of loss is small. Their run of fortune will continue and they know it. When they mourn, when they are betrayed or lost or alone, their responses will be effortlessly elegant. Even their feelings, David realized, were better than his.

  Natural disaster

  The following Sunday, when they exited Borough station hand in hand, David realized the revelation had not worked, or at least not in the way that he’d hoped. He’d expected to spend the week comforting her, or him, or both, but in fact had heard very little from Glover, and from Ruth nothing at all. And then late on Saturday night he’d received a perfunctory, mysterious text from her asking him to meet them both at twelve the next day by the station, if he was free, as they needed to canvass his opinion. The neutral venue. The monumental time of high noon. He imagined the three of them would sit in the snug of some pub, and Ruth and Glover would outline all their feelings for each other, and he’d preside over a difficult session of accusation and counter-accusation, and then, at the end, he’d lean forward, his eyes glossy with tears, and advise them that only a total separation would work.

  Instead Glover’s arm was lolling across Ruth’s shoulders, her fingers appeared from around his waist. They were presenting a united front. Blinking enthusiastically in a way that made David clench his fist in his duffel coat pocket, Glover said they’d decided to have a pre-wedding get-together on the eve of the service and they were heading to the South London Tavern to check out the private room upstairs. The news perforated David, and all his excited, nervous energy leaked from him. They stopped a
t a newsagent’s so he could buy a can of Coke, and he watched through the window as outside Glover pulled Ruth to him as if they were jiving.

  As they walked Ruth described how the reception would be in Larry’s house in Regent’s Park, a huge terrace in a row designed by John Nash. It was six floors tall, with an iron spiral staircase from the kitchen to the landscaped garden, where they planned to erect a small marquee. Larry had a superb collection of contemporary art—and David pretended to be excited about seeing his Hodgkinson, his Kiefer, his Twombly and Riley.

  To have the pre-wedding drinks on Borough High Street was to add contrast, David assumed. According to Glover, Ruth had liked the idea of the Tavern at once. Tom had offered to have something in the Bell, but that was in Soho and had no private room. Glover’s keenness to have the party locally suggested he was trying to hang on to something, some part of himself. Aware, David thought, that some of Ruth’s interest in him stemmed from his authenticity, he was not above playing up to it.