Collected Stories (85 page)

At that I came home. It was easy to fail, I found, and for a couple of months I felt I’d been thrown out of my bed and onto the street in the middle of the night. But it didn’t get in my way. I succeeded at property. With the aid of my wife, who was an estate agent in an office around the corner when I met her, but a ‘property investor’ a moment later – and despite the vicissitudes of the capitalism whose end my pals and I had wished for – we kept moving house and buying flats, which we either rented or sold. Within five years I had achieved easily my father’s ambition, never to have to do another honest day’s work.

I’d never been particularly compelled by money before, and I’d never met anyone whose ambition was only to accumulate wealth. While a teenager I had imagined that being an artist was the most desirable occupation there could be. I found, though, that for a while money and its gathering was as interesting as anything else, until I stopped noticing that I had it. Showing off embarrassed me, and on those occasions when I was forced to see what a struggle life is for most people, the wealth we had skimmed from the world began to curdle, and the temptation to become a human rights activist was almost overwhelming.

Because there was a necessity for a considerable amount of socialising with the most materialistic people on earth, and I am, I’ve been told, something of a weak-willed if not masochistic man, I saw that it was simpler for me to co-operate rather than whine. My wife liked everything about property – views, gardens, locations, carpets, lampshades. To her it was like collecting art, except that she was a kind of artist too, remoulding everything she bought and not encouraging dissent. I enjoyed her passion and, later, her devotion, concentration and absence. For the conventional amount of time, almost five years, I liked almost everything about her.

We seemed to acquire houses wherever they built them, particularly in the South of France and Italy, staying there with the children and their friends and parents. There were outings, barbecues, dinners and all manner of parties and jubilation, including visits to water parks, with nothing much for me to do except talk.

After a time I found myself taken aback and most likely depressed by the inevitable decline into coolness which appeared to accompany most marriages, requiring acceptance, secrecy or insurgency. What had once satisfied was gone; how then should you live?

Being heroic, I came more or less to allow the situation, having considered bolting. I had little inclination to rebel. I admired subversion in others, but it would seem unnatural to me not to live with my children, visiting them from time to time like a kindly preoccupied uncle. My ambition has gone into the four of them. When I wonder now what I’ve done, I can only say I’ve been with the kids, eating, talking, arguing, going to the movies, listening to music, drifting around the streets, playing tennis; that’s where years of my time went, and you can’t measure, count or discount it.

Naturally the ironies of the period could be a torment. How could I be unaware that we now lived in a rabidly sexual time? My life had spanned what was known as the sexual revolution: from repression to – unrepression, until we reached the prohibition of shame, the prohibition of prohibition. And there was I, in an age of sexual envy, only a curious onlooker. What a beautiful rack it was. I’d say that after fifty, you have to be cunning about your pleasures if you’re to have any, and why would you want to?

I saw it was the women in Tolstoy, Zola, Colette and Jean Rhys that I had liked when I could be bothered to read, as a teenager, a way of being close, but not too close, to women. Why not make a vocation of it? I allowed myself to become fond of the wives of rich peripatetic businessmen, of which there always seemed to be a multitude nearby. Restless and bewildered, they had everything but a man to be curious about them, and to tease them with possibility. The modern illusion that women can have ‘everything’ is a monumentally misleading platitude, leading to despair if you ask me. As is the idea that love is sufficient for a marriage. It is institutions, not affection, which tie people together in the long run.

In the short run I was a double-agent, pretending to be interested in financial increase but actually with a rage for closeness. Where possible I didn’t sleep with the women, not wanting to provide my wife with an excuse for more indifference, claiming, when necessary, tightness in the chest, gout or high blood pressure.

It is true I am stout, have sciatica and cannot walk far, though the doctors encourage exercise for those recovering from heart attacks. Lengthy strolls with the girls around various country estates were sufficient to evoke longing, intimacy and fantasy in all concerned. It was their vulnerability I liked. Maybe I was playing Phillip’s role, being inaccessible, the one who never delivered, believing he had nothing to give.

I had been editing a book of ghost stories and desultorily writing episodes of TV dramas, to keep my hand in; work-in-regress you might call it. The other day a kind woman said to me, you artists are the lucky ones, knowing what you want to do and why you live, productive, praised and pursued by women. This struck through my indolent complacency, and I thought I might go back to serious scribbling, to see if there was something I might need to say that I couldn’t keep to myself.

Meanwhile, once a week, I work in a women’s prison. These are asylums by another name, and the unhappy women – ‘my murderesses’, I call them – raving, silent, gurning and drugged, sometimes like to report their misfortunes to me, occasionally writing them down. I can hardly think of a darker or more miserable business. Although each of us builds our own prison and then complains about the confinement and the food, I know I’ll never become accustomed to hearing those heavy keys turn in their locks. Thank God, even now I am capable still of rebelling against myself.

The tube journey had been one of the most desolate Mike had endured, and he’d been looking forward to opening the door into the warm hall, hearing the voices of his wife and children, and seeing the cat come down the stairs to rub itself against him.

Mike rarely worked less than twelve-hour days and it had been weeks since he’d got home this early. The au pair saw more of his house and family than he did.

He thought he should give his wife the news straight away, but Imogen passed him in the hall carrying a gin and tonic, saying she was going upstairs to have a bath. Mike pulled a frozen meal from the freezer and put it in the microwave. Waiting for it to heat up, he poured himself a glass of wine and stood at the long windows which overlooked the garden.

He had been intending to start reading about and collecting wine. Imogen had insisted a hobby would make him less restless; having recently given up smoking, wine would be some compensation.

He believed he was good at giving things up. Unlike some of his friends and colleagues, he could control himself, he wasn’t any sort of addict. But now that the financial system was out of control and today he had been fired, forsaking almost everything – including his idea of the future – was a different matter.

He switched on the garden lights and, looking out at the new deck where last summer they’d held barbecues, thought, ‘I paid for this with my time, intelligence, and the education the state provided me with.’ At the far end of the garden was a shed he’d had built for the boys to play music in, fitted with a TV, drum-kit and sound system. The kids had stopped using it before he’d hardly begun paying for it. Beyond that he could see into the bathrooms and bedrooms of other families much like theirs.

Situated on the comfortable outskirts of London, their house was narrow with five floors and off-street parking, overlooking a green. As the boys liked to point out, other children at their schools lived in bigger places; their fathers were the bosses of record companies or financial advisers to famous footballers. Mike, in corporate finance, was relatively small-time.

Still, he and Imogen had been seriously planning more work on the garden as well as the rest of the house. It was something they enjoyed doing together and, until recently, in this prosperous part of London, scores of skilled Polish labourers had been available. Most of Mike and Imogen’s friends had been continuously improving their properties. It had been a natural law: you never lost money on a house. Maybe Mike should have been more attentive to the fact that the shrewd Poles had begun to return home a year ago.

Mike put his plate on the hyper-shiny elegant dining-room table where he liked to have supper and talk with friends. Imogen, who for years had never knowingly ingested anything non-organic, would have already eaten with the children. From where he sat Mike had a good view of the two boys playing a violent video game on the family television.

His food wasn’t really edible: the rice was dried up, the prawns rubbery. The boys’ dirty plates were still on the table, which was otherwise covered in school books, pencil cases, a rucksack out of which a football kit was tumbling, and three £20 notes Imogen had left for the cleaner. Mike picked one of them up and looked at it closely. How had he never noticed what a sardonic little Mona Lisa smile the blinged-up monarch wore, mocking even, as if she pitied the vanity and greed the note inspired?

‘Mike, you’ve been stalked by good fortune your whole life,’ his father enjoyed saying to him – the father who only finished paying off his mortgage when he retired, but otherwise considered debt a moral failure. ‘In Kent where I lived as a child there were German bombs every night. You have suffered no such catastrophes, and no murders in the family. You’re one who escaped the twentieth century!’

But not the twenty-first.
The
word of the post-9/11 era, used interminably by politicians and psychologists, was ‘security’, and the more the country had appeared to be policed by men in fluorescent jackets with ‘Security’ stamped on the back, the more afraid Mike felt – with good reason, as it turned out. Having progressed to running a department of forty people, Mike’s current job was to execute the employees he had engaged and, in two weeks’ time, pack up and remove himself.

‘Take out your plate and wash it up,’ he called across to the fifteen-year-old, who was playing the game.

‘I did it yesterday,’ Tom replied.

‘It
is
your plate,’ said Mike. The boy ignored him. ‘And please turn that game off. Let’s watch the football or a comedy. I need to be cheered up tonight.’

‘Leave me alone,’ said the kid. ‘I’ve just started. When you’re here you never let me do anything. You’re so controlling.’

‘Ten minutes and it’s going off.’

‘No it isn’t.’

‘Go and waste your life in your own room.’

‘My television’s broken,’ said Tom. ‘Why don’t you get it fixed like you promised? What have you ever done for me?’

‘I’ve given you all I’ve got and always will do so.’

‘Are you joking? You’ve done nothing for me.’

The smaller boy, four years his brother’s junior, and who claimed to have hurt his foot, hopped across to Mike and rested his head on his shoulder. Mike put his arm around Billy and kissed him. The older boy would never let Mike or even his mother kiss him now.

Mike had found it entertaining that some of his colleagues had stated their intention of becoming gardeners until the recession lifted; apparently the only requirements were an empty head and a desire to develop your muscles. Others had said they might be forced into teaching. Mike, at forty-five, had no idea what he would do. First he had to lose everything.

Billy patted Mike on the back, saying, not without an element of patronisation, ‘
I
like you sometimes, Daddy. But I want guitar lessons. So first I’ll need the guitar and the amp, like Tom has.’

Family life could appear chaotic, but theirs was finely organised, with every hour accounted for. As well as attending private schools, his sons had, as far as Mike could recall, tennis, Spanish, piano, swimming, singing and karate lessons, and they frequently attended the cinema, the theatre and football matches. Like most of his friends and acquaintances, Mike’s debts were huge, worth almost two years’ income. But he had always considered them – when he did consider them – to be only another outgoing. Somehow, sometime in the mid-1980s debt stopped being shameful and after 1989 there appeared to be general agreement: capitalism was flourishing and there was no finer and more pleasant way to live but under it, singing and spending.

Mike pushed his plate away. After supper he liked to retire to his room where he was studying Stravinsky, listening to his work piece by piece in the order of its composition while reading about the composer’s life. Once a fortnight he and his pals held a record group, playing music to one another. Recently an irksome sculptor in this gang had looked straight at Mike and mockingly referred to ‘the cult of money’, calling his profession and its office ethic ‘fundamentalist’, because ardent belief was paramount and doubt discouraged.

The sculptor held the condescending and false view that the imagination was only active in art. Mike had been furious but unable to dismiss from his mind the damned man’s remark with regard to how he lived his life. He wondered whether he’d become hard and, like the sculptor, incapable of thinking his way into others’ lives.