by Nick Laird
‘Oh, it’s nothing. It’s not working anyway at the minute.’
‘What’s it called?’
‘I’ll send you the link.’
Ruth went to check on Jess while the printed pages swooned onto the carpet. David lifted and ordered them, and called softly down the corridor that he’d be back in half an hour or so. He descended into the morning and started walking in the pale daylight towards his car. The sky was a weak medieval blue. Glover was nowhere to be seen.
Upstairs Ruth walked barefoot back into the kitchen. She filled her kettle and turned it on. A cup of Indian chai would settle her. Jess was out cold and she noticed the computer still open on the dining table. She plugged in the internet cord and then called up the New York Times website to see what other momentous things had happened on this, the day her life, again, had come apart. Her lip hurt and her tongue pushed out over it, feeling the foreign swelling. How strange it was, that impulse to push against something and feel a new sensation, even if it was only pain. She had made so many mistakes, and he would not be the last. She thought of James standing there in her living room and turned now to see where the Miró print had fallen. David had leant it against the wall. What was the name of his blog?
James Glover sloped from the lobby, moving his body as if it wasn’t a part of him, as if he were wearing it. Still crying, he sat on the pavement outside a locked pub and saw how the sleeve of his anorak was shiny with snot and tears. The back of his hand smarted where he had…where it had…She had looked at him as if she didn’t know him. He should cut it off, it had so offended. He was a stranger to himself. Two nights ago they’d lain on the bed, face to face, their foreheads almost touching, and she’d played with the soft skin of his ear lobe and stroked his hair, and said he shouldn’t be fearful, that maybe it would last ten years, or five, or two, and he’d frowned and made her promise it would last for ever. He kicked off from the pavement and started to walk south, into the abandoned square mile of the City.
A street away, long-shadowed in low sun, David turned and decided to go back to the lobby. The porter had put on a black tie over his white shirt and eyed him with unqualified hatred.
‘Do you think I could borrow your computer? Just for a minute?’
‘Are you a resident here?’
‘Well, no, but I’m a close friend of Ruth Marks. She’s in 23A.’
‘Can’t you use hers?’
‘It’s not working, unfortunately. Her laptop was dropped and smashed.’
The porter sighed. ‘It’s not up to me. There are rules.’
‘It’s extremely important. Here, I can pay you.’
David pulled out a crumpled twenty from his jeans and straightened it on the counter.
‘No, don’t bother about that. Put that away.’ The porter gave a cursory glance round the lobby. ‘But be quick. It’s just in through there.’
Ruth typed into the search box. The Drab Review. The white line turned blue as the search came back with nothing that looked likely. The Damn Review? She tried again. No. This wasn’t it. She got up to make her tea.
Glover was running. He’d walked down Finsbury Circus, and the gentle slope had started to speed him up and then, without deciding to, he’d started running. He had trainers on and baggy combat trousers—though his anorak was really too bulky—but he kept his arms loose, and his back straight, and began to enter the pattern of movement. The banks and law firms were closed up and the pavements were empty. He would ring her when he got to the flat. He would ring her and explain how he’d misunderstood everything—he realized now—and his behaviour had been completely unacceptable. A bus passed him and he upped his pace. He just couldn’t bear the thought of someone else touching her. She must understand that. David would speak up for him, would explain how much he loved her.
In the back room of the lobby, David called up his blog and turned on the Under Construction page. Then he highlighted the three-page demolition of Ruth’s exhibition and the artist’s biographical note, and deleted them. He quickly typed in a bland, rapturous one-paragraph panegyric. At the forefront of artistic endeavour. A world artist in the full sense. We live in the time of Ruth Marks.
Upstairs Ruth took her tea to the dining table and sat at the keyboard again. David had told her once that he’d been named after his uncles, all of whom were named after the apostles. No, disciples. David and what? Matthew. No, Andrew. Mark. Was Mark a disciple or an apostle? Or was he the evangelist? She’d thought the name had fitted David somehow. His defeatism and his airlessness. Of course, his hands, they were always slightly damp and clammy. The Damp Review—and, oh, here was the page. She clicked on the art section, and smiled sadly. This was really too much.
He might have been barefoot on the sand at Cromer. It might have been the summer after his first year at uni, when each morning he’d gone whipping along the beach, new and lean and fast. He’d been running now for fifteen, twenty minutes. Had come to Blackfriars Bridge and crossed it, then dropped down to the river and kept going—figuring he’d stop at some point, that he’d have to stop at some point. He carried his anorak bunched in one hand and his white T-shirt was drenched with sweat. An African woman clutched her handbag as he slipped past, scared he was about to grab it. Glover didn’t notice. Now he wasn’t even trying. Endorphins surged through him and gorgeous momentum carried him on. He couldn’t have stopped if he’d wanted to. He was being propelled along the curve of the earth, frictionless, oiled and perfectly made to maintain this motion. The skip of his feet on the paving slabs was something mesmeric and primal. Each morning he woke, together, apart, and he thought of her. He was not always thinking about her, but he was never not thinking about her. On the third night they’d made love and then they’d had sex on the dining-room table, in the shower, on the sofa. He’d made her come that last time, on the sofa, and she’d moaned and he’d never heard a sound before that had given him more pleasure. They’d built a nest of pillows on the carpet and wrapped themselves in her massive duck-down duvet and watched Strangers on a Train, drinking champagne and eating toast with French jam and a bag of sweet mandarins. It was the most amazing thing that had ever happened to him. Broken nights when they’d slept in her enormous bed and woken late, at noon, and once she’d kissed his nose and said he had the nose of a very pretty girl, and then said that she loved waking to the sound of someone breathing. And he would wonder afterwards how it had come about. How he had found himself replying to her, half-asleep, a bad taste in his mouth and semen caked and flaky on his stomach, ‘Maybe you should get married.’ Now he swerved around a bench and resolved to jump the next one. It had never occurred to him how it might be taken, how in any case he hadn’t meant that she should marry someone in particular, really, until one of her thin, skilful hands had crawled down to his balls and cupped them, and she’d said, ‘Well, maybe you should.’ And softly, semi-conscious, hypnotized, he’d replied, ‘Maybe we should.’ And she’d known, she’d known. And then he’d done it properly the next night, on New Year’s Eve, and got down all serious on one knee, and they’d both cried and laughed and cried…He vaulted the next bench and scattered the pigeons pecking round a litter bin. He was reaching the plateau, the moment when he left the realm of gravity and entered outer space, when his limbs forgot that stasis ever existed. He held his head straight and tensed the muscles in his stomach, extending his stride and his speed. He would ring her when he got back. He could save this. Love did not appear so often that one stupid incident could end it. People made mistakes. Without sin in the world there would be no place for forgiveness. He was almost sprinting but the pitch was weirdly easy to maintain. He felt as though he could run for ever, as though he could run so fast he could evade everything—his childhood, his parents, David, his job in the Bell, the events of the evening, even his own swinging arms and shunted breath, his legs and his head and his heart, as if he could leave himself behind completely and funnel forward to purest movement, a particle that travels on a beam of li
ght, then quicker than the speed of light.
Daggers, crosses, hearts and bells
David sat outside in the Polo for half an hour, cancelling arrangements. He phoned the registry office first. The woman didn’t seem surprised at all, and then he rang his mother and gave her the details of the guests. It wasn’t his place to explain to them and it was the kind of task that she would relish; she could be officious and mysterious; she could make out a list and cross things off it. She was delighted. He promised to give her more details later.
In the Somerfield on Whitecross Street he bought Jess and Ruth three newspapers, hot croissants, juice and Danish pastries, anything to take their minds off what had happened to them both. Then he had another thought and collected the wedding present, wrapped in glossy silver paper embossed with wedding bells, from the boot of the car where he’d stored it on Tuesday, safe from Glover’s eyes.
Ruth’s lip was swollen now, like a botched collagen injection, which is what he imagined most people would think it was. She said if she opened her mouth too far the cut opened again and bled. She was touched by his compassion. He insisted that he wanted her to have the present anyway. She started to cry again, and hugged him. He made her unwrap it and she said the puzzle picture was wonderful, that she’d always loved kitsch, and this was the definition of that: so bad it was good. It reminded her of Dalí’s elephants and swans, and David said he remembered that picture and then, for a few moments, they were student and teacher again. The swans and trees are reflected in the lake as elephants, and she said Dalí called the technique paranoiac-critical, where hallucination and reality seem to merge, where one thing is always becoming another.
‘I think Dalí is an artist for people who don’t like art. All those details and pellucid glazes. It’s so cold-looking.’
He was nodding along. David thought it was helping her to be able to tell him these things, to be restored to a position of authority. He noticed that there was a box on her dining-room table wrapped in pink newspaper, and that Ruth had painted little black symbols on it: daggers, crosses, hearts and bells. He asked her about it and she murmured it was a present she’d been going to give to James, after the ceremony; then she said, decidedly, ‘You have it.’ He tried to stop her but she insisted, and David wanted to make things as easy for her as he could. That’s how The Nearly Transparent Heart, an original Ruth Marks, came to be sitting on his passenger seat. It was beautiful, he thought, and, left on his bedroom sill, would throw lovely patterns of light on the wall. Maybe he should get the project folders back out again, and change things round a bit. Ruth would have more time now. Or maybe he should just have a go at doing it himself. He’d seen how easy it was.
As he drove home London was warming up. The day was promising. He’d take Glover to a beer garden, maybe even to the George on the High Street, to sit outside in the very courtyard where Shakespeare staged his plays, and then he’d tell him that he’d have to move out. He’d made arrangements. He could have a day or two but that was it. No doubt Glover would be fine, would right himself and tilt back towards the light. He should pray for God’s forgiveness, in the absence of Ruth’s. And David wasn’t always going to be there for him. He couldn’t stay with him now, not since he’d seen what he was capable of doing. For this next passage of his life there would only be a single set of footprints in the sand, awaiting the sea’s deletion, and no one was being carried.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Natasha Fairweather, Clare Reihill, and Zadie Smith. For reading an early draft, thanks to Richard Young, Ben Turrell, Alan Turkington, and Sam Wallace. Lastly, special thanks to Lorcan O’Neill, Tom Bissell, Angela Rohan, Ruth Scurr, and Nik Bower.
About the Author
NICK LAIRD was born in Northern Ireland in 1975, and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. He is the author of two collections of poetry and the acclaimed novel Utterly Monkey. He currently teaches creative writing at Columbia University in New York.
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Praise
From the reviews of Glover’s Mistake:
‘The strength of the book comes from the sheer quality of the writing, the successful search for the right and original word, the crafting of the sentences, and the flourished metaphors and similes…Detail by detail, image by image, Laird evokes both David’s seedy world and Ruth’s rich and pampered bohemia with real expertise and imaginative flair. Written with real panache and frequent sparklings of…brilliance’ Guardian
‘A very special and terrifically enjoyable book. Not to be missed’ Daily Mail
‘Glover’s Mistake is a fine, thoughtful piece of work that combines a compelling plot and pithy insights into the relationship between creativity and criticism; between art and those who make their livings skulking in its shadow’ The Times
‘Glover’s Mistake is a stifling study of frustration and tightening obsession…It is Laird’s poetic voice that it the real attraction. Glover’s Mistake is punctuated by witty social observations and tantalising flashes of brilliance’ Sunday Telegraph
‘A contemporary romance that cleverly turns into a psychological thriller’ Daily Telegraph
‘Laird has a pacy, captivating style that keeps your eyes firmly fastened to the page…He is the kind of author who makes you interested to see what he will do next’ Sunday Business Post
By the Same Author
FICTION
Utterly Monkey
POETRY
To a Fault
On Purpose
Copyright
Fourth Estate
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This Fourth Estate paperback edition published 2010
FIRST EDITION
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2009
Copyright © Nick Laird 2009
Nick Laird asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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EPub Edition © APRIL 2010 ISBN: 978-0-007-37206-5
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Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
Three in the morning
The club
Nutter
The intricate machinery
With a capital A
Collective nouns
The drogue
The recycling box
Like road maps, abandoned
The first person plural
Two in the afternoon
Buddha’s bogus smile
Sixties fittings
What all these people did
All about frustration
Reconciling everything
