Authors: Jim Powell
I should have found some courage that Sunday. If I had thrown myself on Judy’s mercy that evening and said, ‘I’m in a complete mess, please help me,’ she would have done.
Calmly and patiently, she would have done.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s tough. Still, on we go. Just like old rivers and slow-moving trains.’
‘On we go,’ said Judy. A pause. ‘Matthew, there’s something I’ve wanted to ask you for a long time, but I’ve never liked to. When I was ill and you
didn’t get the top job, do you think, somewhere in the back of your mind, you might have blamed me for that?’
‘No. Why should you think that?’
‘I just wondered. You were very sweet then, you know, ferrying me to all the hospital appointments and sitting with me and everything. But it must have taken quite a toll on you. It
didn’t come at a very good time for you, did it?’
‘I suppose not,’ I said. ‘But it was horrible for you, most of all. Anyway, whatever happened, happened. Who knows all the ins and outs of it. But I don’t hold it against
you, no. I’m sure I don’t.’
Another long pause.
‘I was thinking it would be nice to have a holiday,’ said Judy. ‘We haven’t been away since April. We could have a change of scenery. Go to France, perhaps. You always
relax in France. Start talking about future plans. It will be on us before we know it.’
‘Good idea,’ I said. ‘I’ll see if I can get some time off in a few weeks.’
‘Yes. Why don’t you?’
‘I will then. Well, if that’s all sorted, I’ll be off to the pub.’
‘Are you sure you want to go?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m sure. Don’t worry about supper. Lunch was so good I couldn’t eat another thing.’
Judy smiled. I think it was a smile.
I don’t know why I went to the pub. I didn’t want to go, but I had announced that I would be going, and so I went. It was not a place I knew well. I had probably drunk there no more
than three or four times over the years. It was almost deserted on a Sunday night. A couple of young men played pinball in the corner. The landlord had taken the night off. Behind the bar was a boy
who can barely have been over the legal age. The sound system played what I have learned to call R&B, although it isn’t.
It wasn’t a happy evening. I don’t think I’d appreciated how much I must have changed in recent years. To me, I was the same as I’d always been. A bit more crotchety,
perhaps. A heavier drinker, certainly. More depressed about life, well inevitably. But only different in small degrees. Otherwise the same as ever. That wasn’t how Saz and Adam saw it. It
wasn’t how bloody Rupert Loxley saw it. Now it was clear it wasn’t how Judy saw it either. I suppose they might all have been wrong, but it seemed more likely that I was.
I must have changed. And now I would have to change again. On that, all of us could agree. I couldn’t go on like this for much longer.
Judy had held out a path to the future and it was tempting. I felt like a holiday in France, although goodness knows what I’d done to deserve one. Perhaps, once there, I could find the
nerve to admit the truth, and the will to resuscitate my marriage. But I wasn’t sure that was any longer possible. Too much had happened. Judy was probably right. If I wasn’t spiting
her for costing me the only job I wanted, I was spiting her for something. I couldn’t think of any other reason. That thought had never occurred to me before.
Maybe we had simply run our course, in any event. Judy didn’t appear to be thinking that she’d be better off without me, but perhaps she should have been. I don’t think
I’m good for anyone at the moment. I can’t help myself, so how can I help anyone else? I should think everyone would be better off without me. Anna included, probably. I was a miserable
old git and that was the fact of the matter.
At some point everything would get sorted out. The office would get sorted out. Judy would get sorted out. My drinking would get sorted out. My future would get sorted out. I would get sorted
out.
But nothing could be sorted out until I had been to Somerset.
I didn’t have a good feeling about Somerset now. I wished Anna had come back into my life at some other moment, when I was feeling stronger, more positive about myself. A lack of
confidence smells like a dead rat. I needed to be someone who was exciting to know, not some half-cut deadbeat who had achieved fuck all in his life and now never would.
I drank three pints of bitter, slowly, making them last an hour each, and I wandered home alone. Judy was asleep.
The sheets on the bed were white, and of linen. They curled around me, touching me like a lover. A matte morning light percolated through chintz curtains. I rose and drew them.
It was the first day of the rest of my life, as the slogan painted on my faculty wall used to say.
I took my time that morning, the morning of the day I went to visit Anna. When was that? It must have been yesterday, I think. There was to be no eruption from the bedclothes, no panic and
pandemonium in the bathroom. It was a day for lethargic movement, for fastidiousness in preparation, for the crystalline examination of each second.
I was the man with no job on his way to a meeting. I was the man with no income who awoke in a luxury hotel room. I was the black-tied gambler with pebbles in his pockets. I was a supplicant for
the alms of a stranger who was not a stranger. To take these disparate elements, to transform them, to substantiate them, to make them into something beyond the nebulous bric-a-brac they were, was
the business of the day.
I had sent Anna an email from my virtual computer, placed on my virtual desk, housed in my virtual office, a fortnight earlier, the day after the lunch with Ahab and Jezebel. ‘Hi,
Anna,’ I wrote – I was used to hi-ing; it made me sound young, casual. ‘Hi, Anna,’ and then the rigmarole, artfully composed to sound artless on the Northern Line that
morning. ‘Great to meet you . . . remember the meeting I told you about? . . . I’ll be in Dorset on Friday week . . . thought I might pop over to see you on the Saturday
morning.’
‘Dear Matthew,’ she had replied. ‘Amazingly, I appear to be free. I’m usually on a stall at the farmers’ market on Saturdays, but there isn’t one that day.
Why don’t you aim to come at about 11 and I’ll give you lunch.’ She sent directions. No map, just arcane references to roads unnamed and unnumbered, to a barn without a roof, to
the third gate on the left: mandated stepping stones on a route to Middle-earth, each spaced an inch further than a man’s stride.
My plan was provisional. It may give the impression of an orthodox military campaign: identify the first objective; seize it; move on to the second. Carry on, Sergeant Major. Very good, sir.
That sort of stuff. That was how it had started. Now it needed to become mobile, to embrace lightning strikes across open terrain and tactical withdrawals to the woods, or whatever it is people do
when they fight wars. Provisionally I would have lunch with Anna. Provisionally we would go for a walk, using up as much of the afternoon as possible. Provisionally I would ask her out to dinner.
Provisionally we would return to her cottage, quite late, quite loosened by the wine. Provisionally we would . . . we would . . . no, mustn’t get carried away.
Does this sound premeditated? I may be contradicting myself. I may not have the flair for mobile warfare and I don’t know why. I should be trained for it. For all those years, I sat at a
desk and appeared to make money by guessing. But it wasn’t guesswork, because you cannot guess for nearly forty years and end up anything much better than evens. And it wasn’t research,
or not very much research. It started with intuition and, over time, intuition came to be partnered by experience, and both came to be partnered by improvisation. Which was how this day needed to
be, how it could not be for some reason.
I started trading futures for a bet, for a laugh, for ha-ha-ha. At university, none of us planned a career in the City, surprise surprise. We would be journalists, or poets, or teachers.
Something useful. Something that didn’t demand a suit or a haircut. We would choose vantage points, the commanding heights of our autonomy, from which to undermine the status quo. One night
in the bar, several pints into the barrel, someone spun a riff about the joke it would be if we all got suits and haircuts, went for interviews at merchant banks and did the undermining from
within. At half-past eleven at night, with a bellyful of beer, it seemed a riotous idea. I said I’d do it. Someone bet me a fiver I wouldn’t. Then we all thought we’d do it.
That’s how it started.
Nowadays I look at each year’s sprouting of graduates, and they are peas from a different pod, or from the same pod, to put it another way. They are neat and tidy, eager to impress, like
lemmings volunteering for a cliff-side patrol. Jump through this hoop, we say, and they do. Wiggle your ears while you touch your toes, we say, and they do. We award some of them a passport to the
future. To the rest we say fuck off. It was different once. There were more jobs than there were of us. We were the ones at the interviews saying show us what you can do, show us why we should come
and work for you, you fat bastards. We didn’t visit the barber beforehand. And our prospective employers were terrified of us, in a way we have never been of our children’s generation.
They used to shit themselves about what we might do when we got the chance. The only drawback was that we were identifiable. The length of our hair and the clothes we wore commissioned us into an
irregular army. That was the brilliance of the bar-room idea. We would go in under cover. If we had dark suits and a short back and sides, who could tell what was going on in our heads? It’s
an approach that terrorists might usefully adopt.
I was the only one of us to carry it through. I suppose you can undermine a system from within. But it needed qualities I didn’t have, and perhaps a system that was less seductive, more
oppressive. In the end, I’ve undermined nothing and no one except myself.
In the bathroom, I discovered that I’d run out of pills. I thought I had several dozen left when I set off. Possibly I took more than I should have on Friday. It didn’t matter. I
wouldn’t need them now.
I shaved twice that morning, once up and once down. I don’t think I’ve done that since my wedding day. And I took a bath, not a shower. As I lay in it, I tried to induce the state of
mind that meditation is supposed to confer, without the meditation. I numbered my blessings and the fingers of two hands were not sufficient for them. I told myself that today was unimportant, that
it made no difference what happened, that life could become full and fulfilling in many ways and in most circumstances. This was a futile procedure. My mind needed no persuasion; my mind had always
believed that. But no one has yet convinced their emotions through rational argument, and there would be no persuasion of my feelings that morning, or any morning. Anna was my talisman of future
happiness. I had not come far in more than forty years.
I couldn’t decide whether this weekend constituted fantasy or reality or both. As an experiment, I pinched my toes in the bath. They were there, so I was there, so there was some element
of reality. So far so good. On the other hand, Anna was not in the bath, so there must have been some element of fantasy. What about my job? That was fantasy, but I went to the office every day, so
it must also be real. Barnet was real. Judy was real. But, sitting in the bath, they did not feel real. They felt like a bad dream. I seemed to be in some exalted metaphysical state where
everything in my life was both real and fantastic. I expect one of the ancient religions had a word for it, the Zoroastrians probably.
This is another reason why the decision I have made is such a good one. It will resolve the issue of what is real and what is fantasy without my having to do it myself.
Amid the hypertension, I needed to decide whether to tell Anna that I had lost my job, and whether to tell her that the wind-farm meeting had taken place weeks earlier. I was tempted to tell her
both these things. One of the reasons for wanting Anna was that I felt I could tell her anything, everything. This resumed friendship was already based on one lie that would need to be addressed. I
didn’t want to add two more. But was it wise? Did I want to admit to her, so soon, that I was unemployed, or that I had driven two hundred miles with the sole purpose of seeing her?
After breakfast, I packed my bag and got into the car. It was my car now, not the company’s, part of my severance package. It was a trophy car, not the sort designed to drive narrow and
muddy Somerset lanes. I reckoned I must be about twenty minutes from Anna’s cottage, and I had left myself an hour to reach it. I would identify the location, park up and read the newspaper
until it was time to arrive. I had ordered the
Guardian
at the hotel that morning. No bloody
Daily Mail
that day. I punched the postcode into my satnav and set off into the
interior.
I’ve lived an urban and suburban life from childhood. Roads have run mostly in straight lines and the routes from A to B have been uncomplicated. The countryside I know is genteel
countryside. Cows wipe their arses after they shit. In fact, it’s not really countryside at all. It’s an artist’s impression of how the countryside should look in the late
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The main crops are subsidies. Occasionally, not very often, Judy and I have ventured into raw country, staying in agreeable boutique hotels and dining on
exotic menu items flown in from around the world, while surrounded by acres of fresh local produce.
This secreted area was a world apart. Straddling the border of Somerset and Devon, it was a sprawling expanse of countryside, with no towns, just villages of differing sizes. Villages with names
like Hemyock and Clayhidon, Uffculme and Upottery, which you would think no one could have invented. Roads did not run from A to B, or in straight lines at all. They ran like rivers,
serendipitously seeking an ocean that did not exist, through banked ferns and ragwort, ivy choking the trees.
The villages were unpretentious. They sported occasional buildings of blunt ugliness, as if to brag that there was so much beauty to spare that they could afford to wreck this particular corner
of it. If there were streets called Orchard Road or Rectory Way, it was because they ran through orchards or led to a rectory, not because some sleazy property developer was trying to pull the wool
over your eyes. They had pubs where people would drink beer and cider, not mineral water. I expect they sold pork scratchings that came from pigs.