By then it must have been about 11.15 p.m. Row number two followed, (‘Your father’s behaviour was a disgrace,’
‘Why didn’t you just keep out of it,’ etc) during which Penelope threw a plate at me. It missed of course and smashed on the floor. When I went outside with the overflowing ash tray Penelope slammed the door shut and so I waited for five minutes outside in the cold before opening the door with the keys that I still had in my suit pocket.
‘That was really stupid. Good night.’ I left Penelope drinking even more red wine at the table surrounded by dirty dishes and glasses. Without giving any opportunity for further discussion I made my way upstairs to the study and slept on the single bed there, with the window open to let out some of Tom’s smoke. That was my last night in our matrimonial home.
Next morning, I woke early and crept out of the house as soon as I could, dressed in the school uniform of barristers’ attire – designer suit, silk tie and the rest of the crap. My final memory of the last night of matrimonial bliss with Penelope? Hearing her snoring like a warthog as she always did when she had been drinking. The kitchen was still a crock of shit as none of the washing up had been done and the place stank of smoke. Its state was a good reflection of our marriage. What do I think of all that now? That the whole thing was just one big charade. That’s the tale of the end of my marriage.
And…OK, smoking weed is not the answer either. I now feel horribly sick again. And bugger the donkey. There’s not much nirvana in that. Come to think of it, I don’t quite mean to say that, either.
CHAPTER TWELVE
At least you don’t get a hangover with weed. On with the story.
After all that happened that evening I had no wish at all to go home and stayed in the Travel Lodge in Drury Lane. Posh, eh? I knew that I had to sort things out with Penelope but couldn’t bear the idea of facing her again. We exchanged a few vitriolic text messages but, in the end, I got on my motorbike, my one prized possession, and rode home trying to plan what I was going to say in the meeting that we eventually arranged.
When Penelope finally arrived, dressed in black as ever and brim full of ill-temper, it quickly became obvious that things were going nowhere. We sat down at the kitchen table and there my planned conversation did not get beyond the first sentence.
‘I think I want time apart. I…’
‘Fine, Simon, take it.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Fuck off, Simon, you don’t know what the word means.’
‘You’re not making this easy.’
‘Simon, why should I? You’re the one who is leaving.’
The conversation went around in very small circles and got nowhere. So, that was it. Curtain falls on marriage. Two days later I sent Penelope a text message saying that I would move out. We had married on 24 March 1984 - I still remember the date 24384, it’s like a code – and had lasted 18 years together. At the time, I left the marriage with few regrets and even fewer possessions. I spent a couple of weeks in the Travel Lodge but then Jennifer heard what had happened and insisted that I stayed with her, which bugged the hell out of her husband, before moving into a small rented flat in Camden.
In the ensuing months there was the messy business of divorce and sorting out the finances. The house was mortgage free and worth about £2 million. Penelope was an equity partner in her firm by then which meant that she had a very valuable interest in it. We both had large earnings from our jobs and savings of £200,000. I had no intention of dragging out the divorce and so, in the end, we sorted the money side between us and I agreed that Penelope could keep the house as long as I had £700,000. She raised a mortgage, borrowed from her parents and transferred our savings from joint names into mine. It is that money that I put into the bank and which has funded my life over here. When I left England there was about £615,000 left. Here, in Sri Lanka, that would be regarded as an absolute fortune.
As to divorce? There are only five grounds of divorce in England and Wales and adultery is one of them. Again, I made things pretty easy on that score too. I committed adultery. After years of near abstinence I made up for lost time. It was not particularly difficult. Forty-year-old professional and available male with good income, motorbike and independence looking for an uncomplicated relationship without commitment.
Josh used to think that what happened next was hilarious. ‘You did what?’ he blurted out when I first described to him what I did and, for the following few days, he called me ‘grävare’, which means ‘digger’. It involved a tale of oral sex behind a hotel door with an instructing solicitor one night in Birmingham when her boyfriend was away and a four week relationship between the thighs of another commercial solicitor in London who had just closed off her biggest ever deal. It didn’t get me anywhere. How could it? I was a cardboard cut-out. If I had died then, what would I have achieved? Who would I have been? I think of myself then as being soulless, as someone whom nobody knew, someone who just played bat and ball with life. And faith? Well, that was for mince pies, Christmas and last-minute compulsive acquisitiveness.
What was I looking for? I think I found the answer to that, again, when I was in Nepal before I met you. I was watching the burning funeral pyres at the Pashupatinath temple by the Bagmati River in Kathmandu. There are long banks of stone steps leading down to the filthy and almost stagnant river on which bright flowers and pieces of charred wood from funeral pyres float against a backcloth of thick green water. At the top of the steps are circular stone areas where the funeral pyres of neatly stripped and stacked logs are placed, each displaying a body wrapped in bright cloth. I watched a man, who must have been the husband of the dead woman whose body lay on one pyre, walking ceremonially around it with a lighted spill, repeatedly putting his hands together in prayer and salutation to the body. I saw him light the pyre and stare at it in tears and resolution, comforted by his family as the smoke and flames rose from it. And I remember the deep envy and the dense cloud of utter hopelessness that fell over me as I watched, because I felt that I would never mean anything like that to anyone. They might well have been poor, they might well live in a country where the life expectancy is about 65, but they meant something to each other.
What’s that got to do with London then? It is the craving to mean something to someone that I felt so strongly then, as well, but did not know how to find. Eighteen years of marriage which I had trashed, a performance based job, friends from the wealthy legal world, no faith, by then a rented flat in Camden and a mother who was lost in strict religion and grief. I would watch people in London with envy as they talked about their family lives or did everyday things together. I had none of that and emasculation between the thighs of a rampant solicitor was no substitute for what I craved. It was sexually relieving, of course, but it meant nothing. Nor did oral sex behind a hotel door with my trousers round my ankles. I craved full, adult, proper monogamy and I knew that was what I wanted but also thought that I did not have the ability to find it. That’s why Catherine meant so much to me.
However, at least that period of shagging does serve one purpose, I suppose. It means that I really can say that I am able to function as a blue-blooded male and, yes, shagging was fun. And if Tom were to call me a puff after I held the door open to him, what would I do now? I would do exactly the same as Josh did to a fat American at the hotel in Unawatuna in an incident that I will describe later. Pick him up by the back of the collar and tell him to fuck off. Or ram his brown teeth down his odious throat.
So, I told the clerks that Penelope and I were separated; they needed to know where I was living as they often rang me out of hours. Dave, the head clerk, just said: ‘What took you so long, sir?’ My personal life was of no interest at all to the clerks, I was a cog in a machine – a sale commodity in a big department store.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Jennifer was the person I turned to, as I always did in times of crisis and she let me talk and talk as I tried to find my feet again. Jennifer is kind, really kind.
Other than Josh, the best friend I have ever had. She and I had done pupillage together and her parents, who are Polish and came to the UK after the Second World War, had looked after me when I lodged with them as a student at bar school and Penelope was doing her post-grad training in Chester to be a solicitor. They gave me the same open hearted warmth that Jennifer showed towards me. Although they thought Penelope was ghastly they were far too polite to say it, even when she came down to London to stay in their home with me at weekends. She thought they were foreign and working class.
Telling my mother about the divorce was something else, though. After my father had died my mother, who is French, shut down. Increasingly, she spoke to me only in French and spent hours on the phone to her mother, my grandmother, who lived on the family farm just outside Nuits Saint Georges in eastern France. My mother dressed in black and immersed herself in widowhood, retreating further and further into absolute Catholicism. Small, slight, dark, proud and very determined. She has piercing brown, still eyes but her broad mouth, which she usually keeps tightly closed, tends to droop down slightly at its edges thus giving her a permanent and silent appearance of sorrow. Her only adornment tends to be a strong gold chain that she wears above her black and patternless shirts, of which she has a full wardrobe. I have written to her once from Sri Lanka to explain what was happening and she made it very plain that she did not want to hear another thing about how I was polluting ‘mon âme.’
My paternal grandparents took charge of my care for much of the time after my father died and, eventually, it was arranged that I should go to boarding school when I was aged 11. By the time that I moved from prep school to the senior boarding school at the age of 13 my mother had decided that she would go back to France and so I spent most of my holidays living with my grandparents in Devon with les grandes vacances being spent on the farm in France. Increasingly, I had spent less and less time with my mother so that, by the time that I went to university, I saw myself as living independently in England.
My paternal grandfather had fought in the First World War and had very nearly died. He had been shot in the arm and contracted a severe infection in it which almost killed him. His later life was haunted by the memory of the men that he had shot in the trenches in France. He had manned a machine gun there and spoke frequently to me of the time when he was entrenched on one side of a canal near Béthune with the German army on the other. When the ‘enemy’ tried to come over the canal embankment and cross the canal on makeshift wooden bridges, they were all mowed down by the British machine guns. My grandfather had never spoken of this to my father or, indeed, to others but somehow, he found it easier to talk to me, his grandson, as an old man speaking to a child. He taught me two things in particular. First, how to play a solemn larghetto by Handel on the piano. Secondly, how to end the sentence that he asked me every Saturday morning - ‘It all depends on...’ and I had to say ‘me.’ Then he gave me ten shillings.
My father was born in 1922, four years after the First World War ended. He was therefore 17 when the Second World War started and, at the age of 18, was in the army. He told many tales of the war but there was one experience from which he never recovered. On 15 April 1945 he was involved with the relief of the Belsen camp. The camp had held at least 53,000 internees at the time. There were no gas chambers there but there was illness, especially typhus. My father witnessed mass graves, dying children and adults, putrefying death, the sickening stench of bodies defiled by illness, lack of hygiene and despair - every worst aspect that the human condition can achieve. He never forgot it, still had nightmares about it up to the time of his own death and could not avoid talking about it. It opened up every wound from his past and left them all bleeding. Une blessure qui ne guérira pas. The straw that broke the camel’s back. That sort of thing. I would hear him telling my mother about it all often, and I believe that it was that which drove him to his death even though it was years later that he died – by then everything had caved in on him and he did not have the stamina to fight it off. I would hear him shouting out in his sleep, crying on waking and my mother comforting him, telling him that it was a dream and that she was there and that she loved him. Maybe there was more to it, which I never knew. I can’t say. Today what I did know about would be called post-traumatic stress disorder. In the First World War people suffering from it would be shot if they defected. After the Second World War it was still an unrecognised phenomenon. How pathetic by comparison are the hardships that I have suffered? So, it was, I suppose, that I grew up in the knowledge and aftermath of both world wars.
My father had met my mother while still serving in the army. He had a period of leave while the clearing up operation was going on in Germany and went to Beaune and then up to Nuits St Georges to see the vineyards and sample the wine. He took lodgings at the farm of my mother’s family and that is where they met. Her family still refer to him, or at least did when I knew them, as ‘Jean l’anglais.’
So, back to the telephone call to my mother. After the initial exchange, she asked me how I was. When I explained what had happened she was horrified. She kept saying ‘Je ne sais pas quoi dire’ and ‘je suis navrée.’ She had not picked up any clues when we had visited that things were not right in our marriage. My call obviously reminded her what a dreadful and sinful place the world is. I felt terribly guilty for adding to her grief and, after a few minutes, cut the conversation short with a promise that I would visit Nuits-St-Georges again soon and that I did not need her to come to London to take care of me.
Somehow, I remember feeling, that call made it official that Penelope and I were apart and there was no turning back, not that it was ever on the cards that I might return. Over the next days I made a number of trips back to the house in Chelsea to pick up some of my things, selecting times when I knew that Penelope would not be there. On my fourth trip back I found that she had changed the locks and so I stood, feeling like a burglar outside my own home. I left and didn’t go back. The flat in Camden was furnished, I had the things that I wanted, like my father’s gold cuff links, and enjoyed buying things that I needed - because they were mine and I chose them. Having lived with Josh for the past three years in a shack on a beach where we chose to have very few possessions life in London, even in that flat, seems very cluttered by junk.
I have tried to avoid the next chapter but I keep coming back to my father’s death and I have to face, once again, the part it plays in making me the person that I am. But more than that I know that it lays the foundations for how I feel about you, for what came later and so it really matters that I explain it. It puts you at the heart of who I am, where I want you to be. It is only over the last three years that you helped me rebuild my memory of what happened, so this bit stings. I have never written it down before.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
So, this all takes me back many years; to my childhood in Devon and to a night when, as on most weekday nights, my mother had picked me up from school in the Ford Anglia car that she drove at the time. I was aged eight, a year younger than Sunil was when I first met him. It was January 1971 and so it was dark by the time that we got home. How much of what follows is true memory and how much is acquired memory I do not know; I can only write what I think that I remember.
As we pulled onto the drive I saw my father’s Triumph Herald car was there, which was unusual because I knew that he should have been at work; he was a solicitor in a small local practice in Devon. My parents used to joke with good humour about each other’s cars, my father saying that the Anglia was a piece of American junk, my mother suggesting that she could not make up her mind which was better looking, the Herald or my father. It may be a childish ignorance but I believe that they loved each other deeply. My dad was my mother’s Josh, I suppose – I wish I could be like her now, but it’s no use pretending.
I have no brothers or sisters and so I felt a strong triangle of love and attachment with my parents. My father was fun to be with, loving, warm. It was to him that I turn
ed if I needed comfort or if something needed to be sorted out, like homework or a problem with other children at school. My mother is neat, organised, Catholic and has always been somewhat distant and reserved.
That night everything was dark. There were no lights on in the house. I just remember a sense of complete darkness and the indefinable sensation that something was wrong - like just before the wave struck the train at Peraliya or when the Colossus has been about to devour me in a repeat nightmare that I have. You feel it before you see it.
‘Reste ici dans la voiture, Simon. Je veux aller voir ce qui se passe.’ I remember those words precisely - my mother obviously also sensed that something was not right and I could feel her anxiety; she tended to resort to French when she was on edge and I remember to this day the immediate signal that her use of French gave to me. I also remember feeling a sudden urge to cry, but didn’t do so. I was frightened but didn’t know why.
My mother got out of the car and, for some reason, called out ‘John’ but there was no reply. I saw her look into his car and then make her way towards the front door of the house. I remember that I could still just see her as she bounced her handbag up and down in search of her keys and that she fumbled with them, trying to get them into the lock. I remember her sweeping her hair back with her hand in a gesture that she always did when worried about something. She turned on the porch light as she went in and then I saw other lights go on in the house as if a stage was being lit. I waited. I did what she had told me to do but then I became afraid of being on my own. She had been a long time. I opened the car door and went into the house. My mother had left the front door unlocked and I remember slipping through it quietly, knowing that I should have stayed in the car.
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