‘Just me.’
T
he gigantic red removal lorry of the Younts’ possessions had left at about eleven o’clock, heading down the M4 to Minchinhampton. Arabella and the children had gone down to the country the day before, and now only Roger was left in the empty house, with nothing left to do but drop the keys off at his solicitor’s. Then he too would drive down to the country and their Pepys Road years would be over and their new life would begin.
Roger was looking forward to it. That was what he told himself. The new new thing. He was done with the city and with the City. He was done with the commute to work, with pinstriped suits, with City boy subordinates and Eurotrash bosses and clients like Eric the barbarian; done with earning twenty or thirty times the average family’s annual income for doing things with money rather than with people or things. He was done with London and money and all that. It was time to do or make something. Roger was completely sincere in this conviction, even though he wasn’t quite sure what he meant – wasn’t quite sure what he meant to make or do. But, something.
In his last fifteen minutes in Pepys Road, Roger went right to the top of what was still legally his house, to the loft which had been converted, after discussion, into a ‘spare room’. Arabella had wanted a study, but been forced eventually to admit that she never actually did any studying so didn’t need one, and while Roger had been tempted to
claim it as his den in the end he’d settled on a smaller, snugger room on the second floor, one which by taking up less space was likely to be easier to defend as his territory (‘But the boys
need
another room’). Then down through the boys’ bedrooms, the only evidence of their former presence the bright wallpaper, cowboy (Josh) and spaceman (Conrad) – and also, for the observant, the scratched pencil marks indicating how the boys were growing. Their bathroom was bright orange. Then down, Roger’s den, the fitted bookshelves still there and the space where his Howard Hodgkin had sat (a present from Arabella when she was trying to make him seem more cultivated), Arabella’s dressing room with her little built-in writing table and the fitted cupboards, the small second spare room with marks on the carpet from the bed frame, the loo, then their master bedroom, where, Roger had estimated, he and Arabella had made love about sixty times, once a month for five years, not that high a figure really, but a nice room for all that, the brightest in the house, painted cream, and empty now except for yet more cupboards, and lighter than it had ever been because the blinds and curtains were gone.
Going to the window, he looked down into the front garden, where the Sold sign was nailed next to the front gate. Roger sat on the floor for a moment to drink in the feeling that all this was no longer his. Let it sink in. It was strange being in the house when it was completely empty. It made it obvious that a house was a stage set, a place where life went on, more than it was a thing in itself. The emptiness wasn’t creepy; there was no
Mary Celeste
vibe here that Roger could detect. More as if they had finished with the house, and the house had also finished with them. They had moved out and now the house was expecting the new people to move in. The house too was waiting for the new thing; waiting to stage a new production.
The change to their life had sunk in with him. It was sinking in with people everywhere, as it gradually dawned on them that hard times were moving in like a band of rain. He wished it had sunk in with Arabella. Roger had been waiting for a moment when she got it: when she looked around and realised what was happening. He had been hoping that a giant penny would drop, a light bulb would go
on, Arabella would have a ‘moment of clarity’ and see that this just couldn’t go on. Not only for economic reasons – for them of course but not only for them – but because this just wasn’t enough to live by. You could not spend your entire span of life in thrall to the code of stuff. There was no code of stuff. Stuff was just stuff. You couldn’t live by it or for it. Roger’s new motto: stuff is not enough. For some months now his deepest wish had been for Arabella to look in the mirror and realise that she had to change. He wanted this more than he wanted his bosses at Pinker Lloyd to be publicly humiliated, more than he wanted his deputy Mark to go to prison, more than he wanted to win the lottery. She couldn’t go on like this.
But it hadn’t happened. Arabella showed no sign of thinking that she couldn’t go on like this. On the contrary, she showed every intention of going on as she was for ever. No Plan B. It was labels, logos and conspicuous consumption all the way. If anything, looking after the children so much of the time seemed to have made it worse. It gave an edge of longing to her dreams of labels and holidays and treats, where before there had been a more straightforward greed. It was a mystery to Roger how someone he knew so well could be such an impervious, impenetrable stranger. Roger wasn’t quite clear whether she had always been the way she was now, or whether what had happened was that he had moved in one direction and she had gone in another. Whatever the reason for the shift, it was real, and he now, and increasingly, found her crushingly shallow and wearingly, suffocatingly materialistic. He had worked in the City, among the biggest breadheads on planet Earth – and he was married to a bigger breadhead than any of them.
Now Roger was downstairs. First he went down further to the children’s playroom. If his nose were super-sensitive, if he were a dog, he could probably just get a last whiff of Matya, her perfume, her hair, the way she’d come in from walking around with the boys smelling of the cold, the winter air, the outside, smelling of freedom, of other lives … Roger hadn’t come down much when she was here; he hadn’t trusted himself. But now this was just an empty room.
He went back up to the ground floor. The last time he would ever stand in the sitting room, the last time he’d ever flick off and on the
lights in the kitchen, the last time he’d stretch out his arms in the dining room and twirl around, his last look at the garden, his last time in the corridor, the last time he would close the front door and then lock it. They say the best thing to do is walk away quickly and not look back, but instead he leaned his head against the door for a moment, a last few seconds of physical contact with the biggest and most expensive and most significant thing he had ever owned.
The car was parked immediately outside. He got in, started the engine, pulled out into Pepys Road, and then stopped. He turned and stared at what was now no longer his front door. Time for goodbye. Roger had deliberately not found out anything about the buyers. He’d been out the first afternoon they viewed the place, and then had chosen to be out the second time they looked, because he’d been worn out by all the time-wasters, idiots, fantasists and ne’er-do-wells who came and made offers and then melted away. But these people were serious, cash buyers, whose offer came in at full price, was accepted and went straight through, all without Roger knowing or wanting to know a single thing about them. Now as he took his last look at his old house, Roger allowed himself a moment to wonder who they were. Then he pulled out into the road. At the end of the street he turned and caught one last glimpse of his old front door, and as he did so all he could find himself thinking was: I can change, I can change, I promise I can change change change.