Goodness (8 page)

A Massive Change of Position and Principle

For the first time in some years, as the car accelerated away, I cried myself. Perhaps she was right. It was the end. Though I very much hoped not. Later I prepared myself a couple of scrambled eggs, reflecting that I’d have to set the alarm earlier than usual in case I had to go to work by bus. Shirley had presumably gone to her mother’s new and unnecessarily sumptuous flat in Ealing (the money that would have bought us our own place) and might well spend the night there, leaving me earless. I phoned a few times, but only got the engaged signal. Now I was getting used to it a little, I didn’t feel so unhappy with the new situation. At least there were signs of life, an explosion of drama after what had seemed a life sentence of static friction.

And the following evening, after bowling (yes, bowling!), then dinner, then Rosemary’s place, the advantages of my strategy became all too apparent. I had nothing to gain from not pursuing my goal to the limit now. So there was no hesitation. At my bright and chattering best – I felt seventeen again, but with the advantage of years of experience – around midnight I got Ros (as she asked me to call her) onto a rather Bohemian mattress on the floor (surrounded by mugs, wine-glasses and discarded clothes) and despite my delirious excitement at this new and so different body performed not at all badly I thought.

I returned on Sunday evening to find a note which read as follows:

George, please, this is a nightmare. George, we can’t let our marriage end this way. We can’t. I know it is
partly my own fault, but I can’t help it if I’ve been feeling depressed. I didn’t tell you, but I have been to the doctor about it and to a psychoanalyst, you got me so worried that I might be mentally ill in some way, but both of them told me there was nothing wrong with me. There’s a point at which unhappiness is just unhappiness in the end, frustration just frustration. George, I know that when we were younger, at university, with Jill and Greg, when career and work and all the foreign trips we were going to make seemed so important, I said I didn’t want children. I said I was worried about nuclear war and so on and concerned about what sort of society our generation’s kids would grow up in. Silly things to say really. Now I just know that I want children, my own children. I know that that is the way for fulfilment for me; honestly, I’m just not interested in a career of any kind. I appreciate that you can’t possibly understand this
physically
, I mean the way I feel it in myself. How could you, being a man? But can’t you accept it as a lover and husband and friend? Okay, I take your point that I promised. But it was an ignorant promise, it was like promising not to eat before you know what hunger means. Can’t you see? You’ve become so hard, George. Why not soften up, please? Come on, be my bright handsome, hard-done-by, will-make-good little Methodist again, then let’s forget the whole thing and head off on that holiday together.

All my love. Still!!!!

SHIRLEY.

It was nine o’clock. I phoned at once. She arrived forty minutes later. From the tone of that letter and then her broken voice on the phone, I had imagined her bedraggled: jeans, a sweater, tennis shoes, tear-streaked cheeks, little-girlish. I had imagined we would cry together and both plead mea culpa, then laugh and think how crazy we’d been. That was what I expected, and at least partly very much wanted. Instead she was carefully made-up, her lips were glistening and she
was wearing a new twenties-style cylinder dress that frocked out just above slim knees, her feet pointing carefully in sharp white high heels, likewise new. There was something glassy and brittle and untouchable about it all, but stylish too; it suited her shape, her thin face and round wide eyes. She embraced me.

‘Shirley!’ I sighed. I get these waves of emotion sometimes. I just want to be very sentimental and have everything settled and happy.

But the embrace was brief. She sat down and crossed her legs, leaned forward, enunciating very correctly, as if at an interview or addressing a mixed race audience. She said: ‘I’ll stay, or rather you’ll stay as long as you give up the idea of other women. Otherwise you’ll have to go.’

Looking back, and considering my mood on seeing her walk into the flat at once so vulnerable and stylish, I’m sure this is a concession she could easily have wrung out of me, had she only had the sense to approach the matter differently, that is seductively, kindly, with comprehension. But the idea of going straight back into conflict and being simply bulldozered into concession was simply not on. It was thus with a wisdom that surprised me, worthy of my mother I thought, that I said: ‘Shirley, honestly, there are so many things wrong with our relationship, the only hope we’ve got is to live together happily for a while. Then maybe we can make concessions. I mean, it’s a long process. You have to work for it.’

‘Oh, so for now we just kiss and make up,’ she said. ‘Is that it?’

‘But isn’t that what you said in your letter?’

‘As long as you promise,’ she said. ‘But I’m not going to be treated like a doormat.’

I stood up. Somehow I felt as if I was acting, very aware of my position in the room, of what I was doing with my body, my hands. It all seemed very unreal. Not an unpleasant feeling, but a shade disturbing. I gave the wall a soft punch. I said look, look, if what she was really trying to tell me was that she wanted children and a happy traditional family, then
simply to play it extremely slowly, extremely sweetly, and I might give in, probably would in fact, yes, most men did in the end, didn’t they, but for the moment I was afraid that a baby would simply bind us together all the more, precisely when there were very clear signs that perhaps we weren’t really suited to each other. Wait just a few months, I said. Hang on.

Would Shirley notice if the sun rose in the west? One wonders. Certainly on this occasion she didn’t appear to appreciate what a massive change of position and principle I had just offered, what a major climb down this was.

She lit a cigarette. ‘Unless you promise not to go to this other woman again, then you’re going to have to get out of this flat and go and live on your own.’

‘Shirley,’ I said, ‘we’re both tired, we’re overwrought. Now let’s just go to bed and sleep on it. I’ve got to go to work in the morning. You’re on holiday. I’m not.’ (School had just broken up.)

She said the last thing she wanted to do right at the moment was be in the same bed with me.

‘Suit yourself.’

But in the middle of the night she must have slipped in under the covers because I woke up with a start to find her clinging to me. She was naked, which was unusual for her (she usually wears a rather unexciting blue cotton nightdress). Not crying, not saying anything, she twined herself round me. So that when I had fully woken up we made love, violently, with her on top, which again was unusual. And while this was going on I remember thinking with some euphoria, ‘We’re really living now, really living, a modern life, with passion, with intrigue!’

17 Ollerton Road

Exactly five days before our scheduled departure for Turkey, Shirley received a letter ‘advising’ her that due to cuts in government grants, etc. etc., her school was being obliged to reduce its staff by two and they thus regretted to inform her that she would be without a job as from the end of the summer break. For myself I couldn’t help feeling that this was rather a blessing in disguise. My first big stroke of luck. Now she would be forced to go for something more stimulating where there were real career opportunities to be had, especially since she wasn’t in a position to apply to most state schools, never having got her teacher training certificate. She could move into something like the media or marketing or business administration or product management. Which should force her to brighten up and most probably get over the baby business.

But Shirley took it all very badly. On first showing me the letter when I arrived home from work, she was frantic and it was clear that she had been crying for much of the day. I honestly didn’t know what to make of it. Trying without success to comfort her, I said laughingly that for the tough intellectual cookie she had always been, she was crying rather a lot lately, wasn’t she? She went and locked herself in the bathroom. Not for the first time I experienced that acute, that lacerating awareness of having in all probability married the wrong woman.

The curious thing being that whenever I have this sensation I immediately do my utmost to repress it, I simply won’t accept it, even now, and I get into a veritable frenzy of activity in an attempt to put things right and ‘save the situation’. So
now I looked around and started preparing a
spaghetti alla carbonara
, one of the few decent things I know how to cook, found a bottle of wine at the back of the larder, white, and stuck it in the ice-box, put a tablecloth on the table (took me a while to find where she kept them), sawed through a couple of frozen rolls and stuck them under the grill, etc. I made a feast.

When she finally emerged, I like to think lured by the smell of sizzling bacon, Shirley was thankful but still apparently inconsolable. It was the only thing that had been going well in her life, she said, her relationship with the children at school. The only thing that hadn’t turned sour. And just to lose it like this . . . Everything, everything was going to pieces.

I tried to be cheerful, bustling with kitchen implements I wasn’t quite used to. ‘Think of it as a challenge,’ I said. ‘Get yourself a good job.’ But she said that was another thing, she couldn’t get herself a good job now, could she, because if she did she’d never have a child. You couldn’t take a job and then go and get pregnant in the first few months, it wasn’t serious. And she just didn’t want to leave it for a couple of years more.

I sympathised, though privately I’m thinking, Come on, buck up girl! I mean, if something like this happened to me, I know I’d bounce right back, go for it, don’t let them get you down. Where was her
joie de vivre
, for heaven’s sake? She was only twenty-eight. And the following day, overtaken by a sudden summer horniness urgent as thirst, and seeing as I hadn’t actually promised anything to anyone just as yet, I left the office early (thinking, after all, we’d be on holiday next week) and went over to Willesden to see Rosemary.

Who had her period. Mistresses, one feels, shouldn’t have periods. We kissed and sat and talked. She was saying (again!) how amusing my grandfather had been with all his navy stories and little jokes and she kept asking, rather pointedly I thought, about my family and job. When I tried to get away after an hour or so, she protested, she wanted me to stay the night all the same, period or no period, so that I
finally had to explain what experience now tells me I should either have got out in the open at the very beginning or just forever and forever denied: that I was married (but that my wife and I didn’t get on and were thinking of divorcing, etc. etc.). Rosemary told me to put on my jacket, pick up my flowers and my bag and get the hell out at once. Just get out. Which, after only a second or so’s lightning quick thinking, I decided to do.

I drove home and gave the flowers, fortunately still in their wrapping paper, to Shirley, which did have some cheering effect. But it was a day of incredible blunders. For, embracing me to thank me for the flowers, she sniffed the perfume an earlier embrace with Rosemary had left. (Women are so sharp with perfumes, whereas to be honest I can barely tell one from the other, they all smell of sex to me.)

I confessed at once. As I said, I was determined to be honest if nothing else. This time she didn’t cry but was extremely cool and collected.

‘So out you go.’

She went into the bedroom and started piling my stuff into suitcases. I refused to take any notice and sat down in front of some programme on geriatric care, which again had me wondering whether it wasn’t time to dislodge Grandfather and sell Gorst Road.

‘Out,’ Shirley reappeared. ‘Your bags are in the hall.’

‘Where to?’ I said.

‘Wherever you like.’

‘Shirley,’ I said. ‘Come on, we’ve been through all this. Please be reasonable. Anyway, if I go, how are you going to pay the rent, now you haven’t even got a job? Then we’re supposed to be on the ferry Saturday morning at ten.’

‘Out.’

She sat down, leggily cross-legged on the floor and started to stare at me, while I continued to watch the television. She stared and stared, having me feel the full pressure of a gaze I refused to return. Then she had just opened her mouth to speak when the doorbell rang and it was Mark and Sylvia with their usual bottles of beer. And for once they were warmly
welcomed, by both of us, as if by prior agreement. Oh hello, old mate, great to see you! Great!’

For a couple of hours we sparkled, we talked about the old woman downstairs who had taken to moving her furniture about in the middle of the night, the guy in the next block who put a blanket over his Maxi even in summer, about the three hundred Sri Lankans moving in at number five; Shirley rustled up some very attractive cheese and salad snacks on hot rolls; it was all perfectly charming, and even after they left nothing particularly unpleasant was said. Just that the following evening I had barely clattered through the door, before Shirley was barring the passageway announcing she’d found a room for me, in Southgate.

‘Out,’ she said. She put two freshly cut Yale keys on the top of the sideboard. ‘17 Ollerton Road. You can find it in the
A-Z
. The first month’s rent’s paid. Now go.’

I didn’t think. Without a word, grim-faced, grabbing destiny by the scruff of the neck, and mainly just to show her I didn’t give a damn, I picked up the suitcases, picked up the keys, which had the address and various other bureaucratic jottings attached to them on a luggage tag, and bumped downstairs. At least I got the car this time.

The room was what you might expect, one of London’s endless makeshifts, a grand old Victorian house, now eight separate bedsits. My predecessor, I saw from the bells on the door, had been called Ms Deborah Samberuts. Well. I climbed to the third floor and found a single divan, chest of drawers, wash-basin, wardrobe, etc., all perfectly clean and irretrievably shabby. The pull-down blinds were broken. The walls were grey. A Picasso poster had been mended with Sellotape some long brown time ago and there was the dense smell of aerosol air freshener engaged in unequal combat with years of tobacco smoke stale in a tufty carpet. I looked round, smoked a cigarette myself to sort out the pong, then left my suitcases and went out to find a pub and eat something.

I think perhaps for three or four hours then I really believed that this was it, that we had separated, that I was going
to live in this squalid room for a month or two before finding something more suitable and generally starting a new happier, healthier, or at least less stressful life, preferably as near as possible to the office, Greenford perhaps or Perivale. Rent a flat, fill it with appliances, pick up a really good car on the never never, I quite liked the look of the new Audi 80.

I closed the door and set out. The evening air had a cool but summery smell walking down to the main road; I interpreted it as a smell of freedom. The pub was full of young people who, from the volume of their conversation, the haze of smoke and maze of glasses around them, obviously shared my belief that life was for friends and fun. At one point there was a flurry of back-slapping and shouts. I sat on my own and watched animated faces, the shifting and posture of bodies, attractive and otherwise, and I must say I took a sort of quiet, determined pleasure, watching these people drink and talk.

However, towards midnight, alone in Ms Samberuts’s room, when it came to unpacking what Shirley had put in those suitcases, finding toothpaste and pyjamas, a half-full bottle of Milk of Magnesia, my athlete’s foot powder, I don’t know why but I was simply overwhelmed by a great flood of emotion. I bit the pillow and wept. Physically I felt thoroughly sick, with a strain about my throat, tight chest, aching muscles. I beat my fists against the mattress and roared.

One wonders now about these explosive, these absolutely debilitating emotions: a fully-grown man lying in a shabby suburban room moaning. One wonders if somehow they mightn’t have been controlled, tranquillised, fended off. For looking back, here was an escape route I would have done well to have taken. For Shirley’s sake too. For everybody’s. The irony being that I often wonder if these tumultuous feelings of regret, of sentiment, gusting through me like storm winds the way they do, aren’t perhaps after all the best part of George Crawley, the nearest he comes to love. And equally frequently I will catch myself wondering if Hilary isn’t my destiny somehow, if my present dilemma, which arose out of that crisis, isn’t precisely the decision I was born to make.

I don’t know. The superstitious mentality dies hard of course. In any event, I wept on the bed in this rented room, tried to sleep, couldn’t, then did, and promptly had one of the truly atrocious nightmares I would later have to learn to get used to.

Mutilation is my forte with nightmares. It begins as a suffocating sense of horror, concentrated about clenched jaw and tight Adam’s apple. Then all at once I’ll be aware that, for example, my hand is missing. There is just the wrist dripping blood, perhaps the bone protruding, ragged flesh. Following which we plunge into hectic, gorily visual oneiric narrative as I feverishly wrap the stump in a blanket, in toilet paper, and start searching for the lost hand, wondering if it can’t perhaps be saved, re-attached, my mind actually flicking at tremendous speed through all the sensational stuff one reads in papers about surgeons working all night to put some child’s arm back on – always a child’s. And in my dream, strangely, I am both a child and an adult, as if I had lost this hand years ago, yet the wound is still bloody and fresh.

I search. Gorst Road. Always Gorst Road. Sometimes it’s my hand I’m after, sometimes my foot or leg, sometimes my dick, or even my head. Like some horrible ghost, I hunt through room after room, turning over settee cushions, opening drawers, the way in waking life I frequently look for keys I’ve mislaid, pens, papers, tickets. But the missing part is never found, just as the accident that caused it is never explained. And perhaps as I search I don’t really want to find it, thinking how gory it will be when I do, remembering a book I read once where somebody digs his murdered child’s head from a shallow grave, the eyes full of mud. Or on other occasions the search will turn up not the missing part of me at all, but Grandfather, gross and bloated in his armchair, or Aunt Mavis of all people, on her back, nightdress pulled up over a thick white belly, face hideously giggling in death.

Such is my average nightmare, the kind of neurosis-generated angst fantasy that merely confirms one’s contemporaryness, I suppose – busy man, under pressure – the
kind of thing you can even learn to look on with a certain affection after the nth recurrence.

But the night Shirley threw me out was the first time. And the interpretation seemed obvious. I was mutilated by this break-up. Indeed in my sleep I started calling out for her, needing to show her the disaster, the bloody stump, and so finally, shouting my wife’s name, I woke myself up. I was in a sweat, shocked and full of adrenalin. Immediately, in just pyjamas, relieved as I moved that I hadn’t stopped to agonise over this one, I ran down two flights of gritty, lino-covered stairs to a pay phone on the first landing. Then back to my room for a coin, then back to the phone.

I wept as I spoke. She wept on hearing me weeping. We told each other we couldn’t bear the thought of separation. We had invested so much in our marriage, our identities were so wrapped up in it, in each other, we just couldn’t bear for it to end. Who were we if not our marriage? In half an hour I was home and enjoying precisely the sentimental reconciliation I had hoped for and been denied just days before.

So that only a few weeks later, shortly after our return from Turkey, it would be the rings in her urine in the middle of the night, followed by the serious talk with Mr Harcourt, the mortgage, the payrise, the house in Hendon with permission for an extension, nausea, pregnancy books, pre-natal classes and a host of purchases to be made . . .

Such was the power of love. And now it actually came to it, I didn’t mind. I thought, you can handle this, George. You can be happy with this. This is the way life goes. It’s manageable. For Shirley was in such delightful mood now. She was so bright and pleasant, so much my old Shirley. And I thought, you should have caved in on this one ages back, George. This isn’t going to do you any harm. When we lay in bed one night going through the Penguin book of names, I said: ‘If it’s a girl let’s call her Hilary.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it means cheerful, apparently. Like us.’