He asked, ‘Is there anything else that you would like me to do for you?’
‘Thank you for asking,’ she said. ‘Yes.’
‘What is it?’
‘Harry, I want to go on a journey.’
*
One morning, when Alexandra was scribbling, he said, ‘I’ll say goodbye.’
She came to the door to wave, as she always did if she wasn’t driving him to the station. She said she was sorry he had to go into the office – ‘such a place’ – every day.
‘What the hell is wrong with it?’ he asked.
The building was a scribble of pipes and wires, inhabited by dark suits with human beings inside. The harsh glow of the computer and TV screens reflected nothing back. Nothing reflected into eternity.
Something changed after she said this.
He travelled on the train with the other commuters. The idea they shared was a reasonable though stifling one: to live without, or to banish, inner and outer disorder.
He was attempting to read a book about Harold Wilson, Prime Minister when Harry was young. There was a lot about the ‘balance of payments’. Harry kept wondering what he had been wearing on his way to school the day Wilson made a particular speech. He wished he had his school exercise books, and the novels he had read then. This was a very particular way of doing history.
He had to put his face by the train window but tried not to breathe out for fear his soul would fly from his body and he would lose everything that had meaning for him.
At work, he would feel better.
He believed in work. It was important to sustain ceaseless effort. Making; building – this integrated the world. It was called civilisation. Otherwise, the mind, like an errant child, ran away. It wanted only pleasure, and nothing would get done.
The news was essential information. Without it, you were uninformed, uneducated even. You couldn’t see the way the world was moving. The news reminded you of other people’s lives, of human possibility and destructiveness. It was part of his work to glance at the French, German, American and Italian papers every day.
However, an image haunted him. He was taking his university finals and a kid in his class – a hippy or punk, a strange, straggly peacock – turned over the exam paper, glanced at the question and said, ‘Oh, I don’t think there’s anything here for me today,’ and left the room, singing ‘School’s Out’.
Beautiful defiance.
Couldn’t Harry walk into the office and say, ‘There’s nothing here for me today!’ or ‘Nothing of interest has happened in the world today!’?
*
He remembered his last years at school, and then at university. The other mothers helped their student kids into their new rooms, unpacking their bags and making the beds. Mother had disappeared into herself, neither speaking nor asking questions. As the size of her body increased, her self shrank, the one defending the other. He doubted she even knew what courses he was taking, whether he had graduated or not, or even what ‘graduation’ was.
She didn’t speak, she didn’t write to him, she hardly phoned. She was staring into the bright light, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, year after year. Television was her drug and anaesthetic, her sex her conversation her friends her family her heaven her …
Television did her dreaming for her.
It couldn’t hear her.
After the television had ‘closed down’, and Father was listening to music in bed, she walked about the house in her dressing gown and slippers. He had no idea what she could be thinking, unless it was the same thing repeatedly.
It was difficult to be attached to someone who could only be attached to something else. A sleeping princess who wouldn’t wake up.
He wondered if he’d gone into television so that he would be in front of her face, at least some of the time.
At this, he laughed.
‘Don’t shake like that,’ she said. ‘Look where you’re going.’
‘What journey?’ he said.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘I haven’t told you.’
*
On the way to work, he had started to feel that if he talked with anyone they would get inside him; parts of the conversation would haunt him; words, thoughts, bits of their clothing would return like undigested food and he would be inhabited by worms, gnats, mosquitoes. Going to a meeting or to lunch, if human beings approached, his skin prickled and itched. If he thought, ‘Well, it’s only a minor irritation’, his mind became unendurable, as if a landscape of little flames had been ignited not only on the surface of his skin, but within his head.
The smell, the internal workings of every human being, the shit, blood, mucus swilling in a bag of flesh, made him mad. He felt he was wearing the glasses the stage hypnotist had given people, but instead of seeing them naked, he saw their inner physiology, their turbulence, their death.
At meetings, he would walk up and down, constantly going out of the room and then out of the building, to breathe. From behind pillars in the foyer, strangers started to whisper the ‘stupid’ remark at him, the one he had made to Father.
His boss said, ‘Harry, you’re coming apart. Go and see the doctor.’
The doctor informed him there were drugs to remove this kind of radical human pain in no time.
Harry showed the prescription to Alexandra. She was against the drugs. She wouldn’t even drink milk because of the ‘chemicals’ in it.
He told her, ‘I’m in pain.’
She replied, ‘That pain … it’s your pain. It’s you – your unfolding life.’
*
They went to a garden party. The blessed hypnotherapist would be there. It would be like meeting someone’s best friend for the first time. He would see who Alexandra wanted to be, who she thought she was like.
He spotted Amazing Olga on the lawn. She wore glasses. If she had a slightly hippy aspect it was because her hair hung down her back like a girl’s, and was streaked with grey.
Alexandra had copied this, he realised. Her hair was long now, making her look slightly wild – different, certainly, to the well-kempt wives of Harry’s colleagues.
The hypnotherapist looked formidable and self-possessed. Harry wanted to confront her, to ask where she was leading his wife, but he feared she would either say something humiliating or look into his eyes and see what he was like. It would be like being regarded by a policeman. All one’s crimes of shame and desire would be known.
*
He didn’t like Alexandra going away because he knew he didn’t exist in the mind of a woman as a permanent object. The moment he left the room they forgot him. They would think of other things, and of other men, better at everything than he. He was rendered a blank. This wasn’t what the women’s magazines, which his daughter Heather read, called low self-esteem. It was being rubbed out, annihilated, turned into nothing by a woman he was too much for.
*
Sometimes, he and Alexandra had to attend dull dinners with work colleagues.
‘I always have to sit next to the wives,’ he complained, resting on the bed to put on his heavy black shoes. ‘They never say anything I haven’t heard before.’
Alexandra said, ‘If you bother to talk and listen, it’s the wives who are interesting. There’s always more to them than there is to the husbands.’
He said, ‘That attitude makes me angry. It sounds smart, but it’s prejudice.’
‘There’s more to the women’s lives.’
‘More what?’
‘More emotion, variety, feeling. They’re closer to the heart of things – to children, to themselves, to their husbands and to the way the world really works.’
‘Money and politics are the engine.’
‘They’re a cover story,’ she said. ‘It’s on top, surface.’
He was boring. He bored himself.
She was making him think of why she would want to be with him; of what he had to offer.
When he came home from school with news spilling from him, Mother never wanted to know. ‘Quiet, quiet,’ she’d say. ‘I’m watching something.’
Gerald had said, ‘Even when we’re fifty we expect our mummy and daddy to be perfect, but they are only ever going to be just what they are.’
It would be childish to blame Mother for what he was now. But if he didn’t understand what had happened, he wouldn’t be free of his resentment and couldn’t move on.
Understand it? He couldn’t even see it! He lived within it, but like primitive man almost entirely ignorant of his environment, and trying to influence it with magic, in the darkness he couldn’t make anything out!
Gerald had said, ‘Children expect too much!’
Too much! Affection, attention, love – to be liked! How could it be too much?
*
On their wedding day, he had not anticipated that his marriage to Alexandra would become more complicated and interesting as time passed. It hadn’t become tedious or exhausted; it hadn’t even settled into a routine. He lived the life his university friends would have despised for its unadventurousness. Yet, every day it was strange, unusual, terrifying.
He had wanted a woman to be devoted to him, and, when, for years, she had been, he had refused to notice. Now, she wasn’t; things had got more lively, or ‘kicked up’, as his son liked to say.
Alexandra blazed in his face, day after day.
Mother, though, hadn’t changed. She was too preoccupied to be imaginative. He wasn’t, therefore, used to alteration in a woman.
Last night …
He had found himself searching through Alexandra’s clothes, letters, books, make-up. He didn’t read anything, and barely touched her belongings.
He had read in a newspaper about a public figure who had travelled on trains with a camera concealed in the bottom of his suitcase in order to look up women’s skirts, at their legs and underwear. The man said, ‘I wanted to feel close to the women.’
When it comes to love, we are all stalkers.
Last night, Harry checked the house, the garden and the land. He fed the dogs, Heather’s horse, the pig and the chickens.
Alexandra kept a tape deck in one of the collapsing barns. He had seen her, dancing on her toes, her skirt flying, singing to herself. He’d recalled a line from a song: ‘I saw you dancing in the gym, you both kicked off your shoes …’
On an old table she kept pages of writing; spread out beside them were photographs she had been taking to illustrate the stories.
She’d said, ‘If there’s a telephone in the story, I’ll take a picture of a phone and place it next to the paragraph.’
In the collapsing barn, he put on a tape and danced, if dancing was the word for his odd arthritic jig, in his pyjamas and wellington boots.
That was why he felt stiff this morning.
*
‘There is a real world,’ said Richard Dawkins the scientist.
Harry had repeated this to himself, and then passed it on to Alexandra as an antidote to her vaporous dreaming.
She had laughed and said, ‘Maybe there is a real world. But there is no one living it it.’
*
It was inevitable: they were nearing the churchyard and a feeling of dread came over him.
Mother turned to him. ‘I’ve never seen you so agitated.’
‘Me? I’m agitated?’
‘Yes. You’re twitching like a St Vitus’s dance person. Who d’you think I’m talking about?’
Harry said, ‘No, no – I’ve got a lot to think about.’
‘Is something bothering you?’
Alexandra had begged him not to take medication. She’d promised to support him. She’d gone away. The ‘strange’ had never come this close to him before.
But it was too late for confidences with Mother.
He had made up his mind about her years ago.
*
Mother hated cooking, housework and gardening. She hated having children. They asked too much of her. She didn’t realise how little children required.
He thought of her shopping on Saturday, dragging the heavy shopping home, and cooking the roast on Sunday. The awfulness of the food didn’t bother him; the joylessness which accompanied the futile ritual did. It wasn’t a lunch that started out hopefully, but one which failed from the start. The pity she made him feel for her was, at that age, too much for him.
She couldn’t let herself enjoy anything, and she couldn’t flee.
*
If he had made a decent family himself it was because Alexandra had always believed in it; any happiness he experienced was with her and the children. She had run their lives, the house and the garden, with forethought, energy and precision. Life and meaning had been created because she had never doubted the value of what they were doing. It was love.
If there was anguish about ‘the family’, it was because people knew it was where the good things were. He understood that happiness didn’t happen by itself; making a family work was as hard as running a successful business, or being an artist. To him, it was doubly worthwhile because he had had to discover this for himself. Sensibly, somehow, he had wanted what Alexandra wanted.
She had kept them together and pushed them forward.
He loved her for it.
Now, it wasn’t enough for her.
*
He said, ‘Would it be a good idea to get some flowers?’
‘Lovely,’ said Mother. ‘Let’s do that.’
They stopped at a garage and chose some.
‘He would have loved these colours,’ she said.
‘He was a good man,’ murmured Harry.
‘Oh yes, yes! D’you miss him?’
‘I wish I could talk to him.’
She said, ‘I talk to him all the time.’
Harry parked the car. They walked through the gates.
The cemetery was busy, a thoroughfare, more of a park than a burial ground. Women pushed prams, school kids smoked on benches, dogs peed on gravestones.
Father had a prime spot in which to rot, at the back, by the fence.
Mother put down her flowers.
Harry said, ‘Would you like to get down, Mother? You can use my jacket.’
‘Thank you, dear, but I’d never get up again.’
She bent her head and prayed and wept, her tears falling on the grave.
Harry walked about, weeping and muttering his own prayer: ‘At least let me be alive when I die!’