by Beth Morrey
With a supreme effort of will, I looked back at him and smiled into the clear blue of his gaze. ‘No, Leo. I’m sorry. I’m just tired. It was a bit overwhelming back there.’
He squeezed my hands. ‘I know.’ Then he grinned, devilishly. ‘Fun though, wasn’t it?’
I managed a laugh, as he pulled me to my feet. ‘Mrs Carmichael, even with dripping hair, you look very beautiful tonight. Would you like to dance with your husband?’ His blue eyes crinkled at the corners as he looked down at me.
The band was playing a slow tempo number I didn’t recognize. He drew me into his arms, I leaned my cheek against his chest and we swayed together, the soles of our shoes clinging to the tacky dancefloor. I could feel him nodding above my head to his comrades, still barracking for an audience, and the words of the song bled into my brain as we circled: ‘Keep your head, and keep your calm … that way you’ll keep your guy.’
‘Bertie,’ I whispered. In the noise and darkness of the cellars, no one could hear me, or see the tears that trickled down my cheeks as I contemplated how close I came to ruining it all. Shattered into a million pieces, like that window in the River Suite.
Bobby licked my hand encouragingly. ‘It’s 1974,’ I said, jolting myself out of my reverie and tapping the answer sheet Sylvie was scribbling on. They all stared at me.
‘The junta.’ I elaborated, pleased I could finally contribute.
‘We know, dipshit,’ said Angela, through a mouthful of crisps.
‘We’re on the year of Saddam Hussein’s birth now,’ said Denzil. ‘Keep up.’
Dave, the quizmaster, was a middle-aged northerner who fancied himself as a comedian and kept saying things like ‘look at your phone, you’ll be on your way home’ and engaging in banter with the team tables, who were mostly made up of rather nerdy-looking men. Sylvie tutted every time he attempted a gag, and Angela, already tipsy, kept shouting ‘Bingo!’ at indecent intervals. Denzil kept the drinks coming, though would occasionally slip Sylvie an answer out the side of his mouth.
Bobby returned from an under-table raid, and I smoothed my hands either side of her silky ears and breathed in her doggy smell, shaking off the memory hangover. Gazing into my eyes, she burped gently, and I recoiled at the stench.
Most of the questions went over my head – in the TV and Film round I had barely even heard of the programmes mentioned, and although I knew some of the films, the questions were too obscure to attempt an answer. The name of the boat in Jaws? Sylvie was furiously making notes. Angela leaned across and scribbled something, and they both dissolved into giggles. I reached for a crisp and held it out under the table. Seconds later I felt a tickle of fur, and it was gone.
‘Hey, Missy,’ said Denzil. ‘You OK?’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know anything.’
He gave me a lopsided smile. ‘You have untapped potential. That’s why you’re here.’ I met his gaze for a second and thought what a kind man he was; so far removed from the shady stranger I’d tried to avoid on Bobby’s first walk. That’s what the dog did for me; got me past that first awkward hurdle. I could do the rest. Or at least, I was learning.
As we went into the final round, Dave tapping the microphone and everyone wincing at the feedback, I looked around the table at my friends, and thought if only I could answer one question, just one question that no one else knew, then I could go home happy. Just let me tap into my potential.
‘Final round, ladies and gents,’ coughed Dave. ‘And this one’s on … DOGS.’
The nerds groaned. Our table cheered.
‘Yesssssssss,’ crowed Angela, giving our neighbours a V sign. Denzil rubbed his hands together and Sylvie twirled her pencil and winked at me. My celebrations were rather more muted; despite Bobby resting her head in my lap, it wasn’t my strongest subject.
‘This round’s a bastard,’ announced Dave. Then he dropped his microphone and said, ‘shit’ into it as he picked it up.
‘Full house!’ yelled Angela.
‘Get a move on,’ snapped Sylvie, arranging her pencils.
‘Question one,’ said Dave, ‘what is the name of Hagrid’s dog in Harry Potter?’
I knew this (Fang). But then, so did everyone else. And so it continued. Adam Bede’s dog (Gyp), Mr Rochester’s dog in Jane Eyre (Pilot), Dorothy’s dog in The Wizard of Oz (Toto). They knew dogs I didn’t know, like the name of Elliott’s dog in E.T. (Harvey) and the dog in Back to the Future (Einstein). We were doing well – we could tell from the pained looks on the tables around us as we gathered momentum and became more and more exultant. We got the name of the dog in Peter Pan (Nana), and then came the final question, and Sylvie said it always came down to that one, that quizzes were won or lost on this last chance, so we had to get it right.
Dave cleared his throat and belched into the microphone. Bobby wagged appreciatively.
‘Last one, ladies and gents,’ he said. ‘Make it count. What’s the name of Odysseus’ dog in the Odyssey?’
There was total silence for a second, and then someone snorted in derision.
‘What the fuck?’ said Angela. She looked at Sylvie, who shrugged and looked at Denzil, who shook his head. Then they looked at me.
Heady with gratification, I leaned forwards and whispered quietly, but with total confidence, ‘Argos.’
Angela pulled a face. ‘The shop?’
‘Odysseus’ dog,’ I replied firmly, as Bobby licked my hand in support.
‘Very well,’ said Sylvie, marking our answer sheet. ‘You’d better be right. My reputation is at stake.’
‘Tap, tap,’ said Denzil, knocking the side of his head with his knuckle and grinning at me.
I sat back, flooded with an immense satisfaction. Dave and the barmaid retreated to tot up, and Denzil went to get more drinks. Scumbag College, the reigning champions, kept sneaking us suspicious glances. It was going to go down to the wire. After an agonizing wait, Dave returned to the microphone, holding the sheaf of answer sheets in one hand and a pint of beer in the other.
‘Well, it was a close one, chaps,’ he announced, taking a sip. ‘But the winners, by just one point, are …’ He looked down at the sheet. ‘Votey McVoteface!’
Sylvie erupted out of her chair, turning towards the crushed-looking Scumbag College with her fists raised in jubilation.
‘In your FACE, IT Crowd!’ Angela roared, as Sylvie did a victory turn of honour and narrowly avoided being hit by a paper aeroplane. There were several boos. No one likes a bad winner.
I fed Bobby a crisp as Denzil went up to collect our prize. We won £42 and a signed Jeremy Corbyn colouring book, which Angela clutched to her chest in ecstasy. Several of the other teams came up to congratulate us and to stroke Bobby, and Sylvie told all of them I’d been the only one of us to know the name of Odysseus’ dog. Just one other person in the room had known, an elderly gentleman from a team called Mason and the Argonauts, who tipped his straw fedora in my direction as he left. We spent £30 on more wine and staggered home with it, frittering our last £12 on fish and chips, which we shared leaning on the wall of my front garden, feeding Bobby bits of the batter and reliving our victory. I felt like a student again, holding a greasy paper bag and laughing as Angela did impressions of the computer geeks hunched around their answer sheets.
‘You were all magnificent, especially me,’ concluded Sylvie, licking chip oil off her fingers. ‘I must go home and pop an anticipatory ibuprofen before bed. It’s been a pleasure, my darlings. Toodle pip!’ She sailed off into the night, back to Decca, Nancy and Aphra.
‘You’re all right, Missy,’ said Denzil, saluting me drunkenly, turning and weaving his way in the opposite direction.
Angela hiccupped and tipped herself off the wall. She began to lurch down the road, then suddenly turned back to me, holding up a finger. Her eyes were struggling to focus. ‘Don’t forget to vote tomorrow,’ she warned, and veered off towards her flat.
I opened my gate, letting Bobby through to the garden for a last
sniff and looking up at the sky, velvety and remote, a few stars twinkling despite the city lights. Eventually she returned and lay at my feet, the noble hound.
‘He fulfilled his destiny of faith,’ I said to her, dashing a tear. ‘He hung on.’ But she’d gone again, weaving her way into the rose bushes until all that remained was rustling.
‘Argos,’ I whispered. He was me, and Leo was Odysseus, and, despite everything he’d done, and I’d done, I would always wait for him, no matter how long it took.
PART 3
‘Friendship always benefits; love sometimes injures.’
Seneca
Chapter 23
I knew Leo was having an affair before he did. He started waking earlier, helping to get breakfast ready, even taking Alistair to school occasionally. He was cheerier than usual, as if suppressing a kind of glee, and most of all, he was more focused. Leo frequently had a distracted air, ‘away with the Tories’, as his great friend Tristan always said, his head in his books. But in those days he was more present than I had ever known him, spending less time in his study, suggesting day trips, even making dinner a couple of times, leaving the kitchen in an almighty mess. He was trying harder, and I couldn’t work out why, until one day I saw him looking at himself in the mirror above the mantelpiece. He smoothed back his hair, then caught me looking at him and grinned guiltily. He was guilty.
He used to smooth his hair like that when he was with Alicia. I saw him once, outside her room, preparing for his entry. He caught sight of himself reflected in the window, and did the same gesture, flattening the unruly tufts at his temples. I became constantly on edge, searching for signs of him straying. Whenever he went away to a conference, convinced he was with her, I looked through his receipts for clues, checked his pockets, read his appointments diary. There was nothing incriminating to be found, but it made no difference.
And then we met her one day, when we dropped by his office to pick up his bag on our way to the theatre. His secretary handed it over, fussing over some papers, and as we left, a girl carrying a pile of books walked past. He greeted her, rather flustered. ‘Carrie! I didn’t know you would be here.’ She turned, feigning surprise, and I knew immediately. She was small and red-haired and of course she was one of his students. I could tell from the way they were with each other that nothing had happened; they were at the circling stage, a consummation devoutly to be wished. That expectation, the holding back, must have been thrilling for them both. ‘We mustn’t hurt Millicent, or the children.’ To imagine yourself a martyr, in the grip of a grand passion, and then to finally give way – what a rollercoaster ride! They were at the top of that first hill, anticipating the summit. There was no way anyone could stop them going over.
So I didn’t say anything in the end, just let them ride it out. He was never so crass as to buy me flowers, but at the height of his little peccadillo, he did take me out to dinner at a smart new restaurant in Islington. That night, sitting in a kind of atrium, all dim lights and discreetly piped classical music, I watched him fiddle with his cutlery and thought how much I loved him, despite it all. He caught my gaze in the candlelight and his eyes crinkled at the corners in the not-quite-a-smile he reserved just for me. I believed he felt particularly well-disposed towards me throughout the whole sordid episode, probably grateful for having such an obliging wife who looked the other way and didn’t make a fuss. Not making a fuss was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
We had a few months of him doing odd jobs around the house, replacing a broken banister spindle, clumsily pushing the hoover round the house a few times and one day, absurdly, bringing home an enormous rocking horse for Alistair. Poor Ali was too old for it, but the sight of him politely thanking his father made my heart contort with the pity of it. It was a handsome thing, hand-carved with a real horsehair mane and a velvet saddle. I could never bear the touch of velvet, it made my skin crawl.
Then all of a sudden it came to an abrupt halt. Leo arrived home one night looking deflated, said something about feeling tired and that he’d been working too hard. Then he disappeared into his study and started writing his new book and we all went back to normal. The hottest love has the coldest end. I saw her on Gower Street a few weeks later, arm in arm with someone her own age. After it had gathered enough dust in Ali’s room, I gave the horse to a children’s home in Highbury. When I told Leo, he prepared to object, and then stopped himself – as good an admission as any. He liked to think of himself as fundamentally decent, and it can’t have sat well with him, all that sneaking about. I was always much better at dissembling.
As the years went by I came to terms with it and even believed that in some ways it strengthened us. Perhaps stepping so close to the edge made him realize he didn’t really want to jump off. The affection he felt for me during that time lingered, while his infatuation passed. As the children grew older, they didn’t take up so much of my time, and I become less exasperated, able to concentrate more on being a wife. After I got used to Ali leaving home, it was rather nice being just the two of us, pottering about together. He ventured from his study for dinner and we would talk about his research, and enjoy the occasional outing – Oxford, Bath, Brighton – Leo in the bookshops and me whiling away the time in galleries and cafés. We’d invite friends for dinner, go to the theatre, take the odd trip abroad. Like our huddle on the dancefloor at Tristan’s wedding, expanding the oikos and then contracting again, but always staying connected, humming along to our song.
We were coasting, idling along the tracks, the ups and downs behind us. But then Leo got ill and everything went off the rails altogether.
I was thinking about Leo’s illness the morning after the quiz, as I got ready to go out and vote, feeling quite upbeat after our stunning victory, and having dodged a hangover. It was a dull day after the balminess of the night before, with the threat of rain, so I took my umbrella and set out with Bobby, who was in fine fettle, skittering this way and that.
After a quick circuit of the park, saluted by Denzil and sympathizing with Sylvie’s headache, I made my way to the polling station in the school hall round the corner from my house. As we neared our destination, though, my pace slowed and I became more thoughtful. After all, Leo was a Eurosceptic. Skepsis … ancient Greek for doubt. Maybe it would be nice to let him have his say, in absentia. It wasn’t as if it would make a difference – ultimately, this was a precipice I could jump off on his behalf, safe in the knowledge that everyone else would catch me.
As my steps became more deliberate, Bobby looked up at me enquiringly.
‘I’m deciding whether to stay or go,’ I told her.
She pulled on her lead, dragging me forwards, which seemed like an endorsement. Securing her to the railings outside the hall, I noted with amusement that bringing one’s dog to vote seemed to be something of a tradition amongst Stoke Newington residents. She sat patiently panting alongside a Border Terrier and a Labradoodle with a Remain sticker on her collar. If anything, it reinforced my decision. Carthage must be destroyed.
I went inside and took my voting paper. In the flimsy little booth, I stared at it for a second, letting the question settle, then picked up the pencil on a string and marked my cross. Feeling sated, I posted it in the box, smiling at the clerks as I made my way out to be met by a euphoric Bobby. Her greetings were always excessive, rearing up on to her hind legs, whining in ecstasy and mouthing at my wrists in her joy and relief. To Bobby, everything was black and white. If I left, it was forever; when I came back, it was for good. She worked in a world of absolutes.
That’s what everyone said about picking sides, that it was a stark choice, yes or no. Hang on, or let go. But it wasn’t that simple. There were other considerations in play; shades of grey where you didn’t necessarily agree or disagree but instead believed that one side summed up your feelings more than the other. I wanted to give Leo a voice, but more than anything I just wanted things to change, to stop feeling sad and bitter and lonely. That small act of rebe
llion made me feel I could change course even in the closing seconds of the race. Life in the old dog yet.
So I left the polling station with a spring in my step, despite the increasingly heavy skies. Rather than take Leo the usual flowers, I took my poll card and left it with him as a kind of offering. As I reached home with Bobby, the first fat drops of rain were falling, and we only just made it indoors before the heavens opened. I dried her in the hallway with an old towel and she sat obediently, lifting each paw for me to rub. When I finished I found myself kissing her on the snout, and she returned the favour, licking me on the nose.
It was so dark inside that I had to switch on the lights, once again relishing the artful clutter of my refurbished living room. Dear Sylvie, hopefully her headache was better. I bustled about making tea and replenishing Bobby’s bowl of water, then settled on the sofa for a read while she twitched and snorted on her bed nearby, her jaws a whisker away from the squirrels scurrying through her dreams. We had an early night, lulled by the relentless drum of the rain on the windows, Bobby in her usual place at the foot of my bed.
In the park the next morning, the rain had made way for bright sunshine, the dawn of a new day, though I had to traipse through huge puddles that Bobby lapped at eagerly. Apart from a couple of rather glum nods from fellow dog walkers, we didn’t speak to anyone. Angela texted me on my way back home, suggesting we meet at our café and, craving warmth and chat, I accepted. We met at 11 a.m., when the early morning rush had passed. She was slumped at our usual table, Otis perched on the chair next to her sucking furiously at a milkshake. Hanna came to take my order and I noticed her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying. Probably boyfriend trouble.
‘I can’t believe it,’ said Angela, stirring her coffee and twiddling the spoon in her fingers in place of a cigarette. ‘How could they? Imbeciles. Do they not realize what will happen? The economy in shreds, every racist and bigot in the country coming out of the woodwork, funding down the fucking toilet, it’ll be impossible to travel anywhere, God knows what else. What were they thinking? The mind boggles, I tell you, the mind boggles.’
