“Oh nonsense.” Sheba’s tone had a surprising sharpness.
“What do you mean, nonsense? You don’t even know what I was going to say.”
“Yes, I do. You were going to say that a child would have given your life meaning or made it worthwhile or whatever, and that isn’t true. It’s myth. Children give you a lot of things, but not meaning.”
“How can they not? Look, when you die, Ben and Polly will be living. When I die, that’ll be it—there’ll be nothing left.”
Sheba laughed. “You think my children are my immortality? They’re not
me
, you know. And, if life is meaningless, bearing children is just giving birth to more meaninglessness …”
“But I’m
alone
, Sheba, don’t you see?”
She shrugged. Confronting a married person with the irreducible fact of one’s singleness is usually the trump card that ends the discussion. I was surprised to find that Sheba did not yield. “Being alone isn’t the worst thing in the world,” she said.
“But it’s funny, isn’t it,” I said, “how it’s always people who
aren’t
alone who say that?” I was quite angry, now.
“Not
so
funny,” Sheba replied. “Maybe they’re in the better position to judge.”
“Look, Sheba, the only indisputable purpose humans have on the earth is to reproduce. And I haven’t done it. There’s no getting round that.”
“Purpose—that’s closer to it,” Sheba said. “Children
do
give you a purpose. In the sense of keeping you busy, in the sense of
something to get out of bed and do every morning. But that’s not the same as meaning.”
I laughed rather bitterly, I’m afraid. What I thought was:
That is the sort of fine distinction that a married woman with children can afford to make.
But she was right. Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world. You visit your museums and cultivate your interests and remind yourself how lucky you are not to be one of those spindly Sudanese children with flies beading their mouths. You make out to-do lists—reorganise linen cupboard, learn two sonnets. You dole out little treats to yourself—slices of icecream cake, concerts at Wigmore Hall. And then, every once in a while, you wake up and gaze out of the window at another bloody daybreak, and think,
I cannot do this anymore. I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery.
People like Sheba think that they know what it’s like to be lonely. They cast their minds back to the time they broke up with a boyfriend in 1975 and endured a whole month before meeting someone new. Or the week they spent in a Bavarian steel town when they were fifteen years old, visiting their greasy-haired German pen pal and discovering that her handwriting was the best thing about her. But about the drip, drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don’t know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the launderette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can’t bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. Or to have the librarian smile pityingly and say, “Goodness, you’re a quick reader!” when you bring back seven books, read from cover to cover, a week after taking them out. They don’t know what it is
to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor’s hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin. I have sat on park benches and trains and school room chairs, feeling the great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I would cry out and fall, flailing to the ground. About all of this, Sheba and her like have no clue.
“So this is it,” Bangs said, with a little flourish, as he opened the front door of his flat. “The bachelor pad!” The living room in which we were now standing smelled strongly of old fry-up. There was a gauzelike consistency to the air. An elderly yellow beanbag and a cheap metal chair sat in the middle of the floor facing a television and a shelving unit filled with videos. These four items—beanbag, chair, TV, and shelving unit—constituted the sum total of the room’s furnishings. “Not much, but it’s home,” Bangs said cheerfully, taking off his jacket and hanging it carefully on the chair.
“Do you think I could use your toilet?” I asked.
To get to Bangs’s bathroom, I had to go through his bedroom. Here the fry-up smell gave way to another, equally strong scent of body—a sort of stale, hormonal mugginess. When I used to visit my father after my mother died, his unlaundered dressing gown gave off a similar odour. Bangs didn’t have a proper bed, just a mattress on the floor and a very flat, defeatedlooking duvet, dressed in a cover of almost sinister ugliness: navy octagons, mustard squiggles. I had a brief vision of Bangs purchasing it—standing clueless in the bed linen department of John Lewis while a dragon-lady assistant with a wire-wool beehive and a vast, ironclad bra assured him that it was a very “masculine” choice.
In Bangs’s bathroom, he, or perhaps some previous inhabitant of the flat, had adorned the lid of the toilet with a cosy—a grimy, orange fur cover—which proved horribly damp to the touch. The sink had green water stains beneath its taps, and propped up in the bathtub there was a clotheshorse hung with a collection of socks and briefs that had gone stiff and crackly as they dried. Adjacent to the tub there was a small, plastic counter. Here, set out with poignant symmetry, were the instruments of Bangs’s toilette. A bar of Imperial Leather soap. A small bottle of Silvikrin hair spray. A tub of something called Krazy Hair. And a rather ancient grooming set—each faded red, plastic item of which was imprinted with the words THE BURGUNDY COLLECTION. It is bizarre, really, that spinsterhood is considered the uniquely pathetic destiny, when bachelors are the ones so fatally ill-equipped for a spouseless life.
On my return to the living room, I did my best to appear unshocked, but perhaps my face betrayed something because Bangs, who was making coffee in his galley kitchen, giggled nervously and said, “Find everything you needed, did you?”
I nodded and sat down on the chair. “Is it all right for me to smoke in here?”
To my amazement Bangs winced as he came out with coffee cups. “Oh,” he said in a grudging tone of concession, “all right, then.” As if cigarette smoke could do anything other than improve his stinky little home. He went back to the kitchen to get me a saucer for my ash.
I noticed as I opened my pack that I was running low on cigarettes. I made a mental promise to ration the remaining ones carefully.
“So now,” Bangs said, handing me my coffee and sitting
down opposite me on the beanbag, “tell me, what kinds of things do you like to do with your spare time?”
I gave him a list of activities that I had engaged in at some time or another over the last five years. Reading, walking, listening to music. And then, because he seemed to be expecting more, I added swimming.
As soon as I said it, he sat up. “Really?” he said. “That’s great. Where do you go? Local baths? Fabulous.” The last time I swam, I was a teenager. In point of fact, I don’t even own a swimming costume. I hadn’t been counting on Bangs paying attention to my answer. I had assumed that he had only asked the question as a polite route into talking about
his
spare time.
“Well, to tell the truth,” I said, “I don’t go that often …”
“What, do you go with Sheba?” Bangs asked.
“No …”
“Does she wear a bikini, then? Because I tell you what, she must get quite a lot of attention in a bikini …” He proceeded to guffaw as if he had said something exceedingly witty and louche.
“I go swimming alone,” I said stonily, curiously protective of my lie now.
There was a longish silence, and then I said, “And what about you, Bangs? Do you have hobbies?”
The smile that had remained after his laughing fit faded. “Oh yeah, different things,” he said glumly. “I’m football crazy, of course. Never miss an Arsenal home game. And I like comedy. I try to go to a comedy club fairly regularly.”
I nodded. It was hopeless. All hopeless.
“Oh, and I am completely and utterly bonkers about
Seinfeld,”
he said.
I nodded again.
“Seinfeld?
You know? The American comedy series?” He gestured at the shelving unit. “See all those videos there? Most of them are tapes of the show. I’m, like, a major fan. It’s great, not one of those normal, corny, American shows. All the plots are about silly, little things that drive you mad in everyday life …” His loud, chirpy voice faltered.
I looked at my watch. “Goodness … ,” I said, stubbing out my cigarette.
Bangs leaned forward out of his beanbag with a sudden urgency. “Can I tell you something, Barbara? Would you promise to keep it secret?”
“Well, I suppose so,” I said.
“No, I mean you’ve really got to promise.”
I took out another cigarette. “Okay, I promise.”
All my life, I have been the sort of person in whom people confide. And all my life I have been flattered by this role—grateful for the frisson of importance that comes with receiving privileged information. In recent years, however, I have noticed that my gratification is becoming diluted by a certain weary indignation. Why, I find myself silently asking my confiders, are you telling
me
? Of course, I know why, really. They tell me because they regard me as safe. Sheba, Bangs, all of them, they make their disclosures to me in the same spirit that they might tell a castrato or a priest—with a sense that I am so outside the loop, so remote from the doings of the great world, as to be defused of any possible threat. The number of secrets I receive is in inverse proportion to the number of secrets anyone expects me to have of my own. And this is the real source of my dismay. Being told secrets is not—never has been—a sign that I belong or that I matter. It is quite the opposite: confirmation of my irrelevance.
“The thing is, you see,” Bangs said, “I’ve got a crush on someone. Someone at school.” He got up from the beanbag and began striding up and down the room.
I understood immediately. How could I have not seen it before? I did not try to stop him, though. There was something angry in me that wanted to play the thing out. “Ah,” I said.
“Can you guess who?” he asked. He smiled coquettishly. If he had had a fan, he would have flicked it.
“Ummm,” I looked up at the ceiling, blinking. Pretending to think. “Me?”
His face froze in bewilderment.
“Try not to look so repulsed, Brian,” I said.
He laughed. “Oh you. You know I didn’t mean it that way. As it happens, Barbara, I think you’re a very attractive lady. You must have been ever so pretty when you were younger.”
I looked out of the window at the battered trees lining the street. They were bending creakily in the wind. While I was noticing the trees, I was thinking that in another second Bangs would understand how rude he had been and that then I would have to watch the embarrassment dawn on his face. But the moment passed. The trees outside continued their wan exercises.
“No, so come on,” Bangs said, “shall I tell you?”
“Go ahead.”
“Don’t laugh, all right, but the person I’ve got a crush on is Sheba.” He paused, waiting for a reaction. I gave none. “Honestly, Barbara, I’m nuts about her,” he went on. “I know she’s married and everything, but I can’t get her out of—”
“Brian,” I broke in. “You offer me this information as if it were news—rather than a statement of what has been, for some months now, blindingly obvious to the entire staff. There is not
a single one of your colleagues who has failed to observe your ‘crush,’ as you call it.”
“What?” Bangs said. He was standing directly in front of me now. The blood was rushing into his face—mottling his cheeks, crimsoning his ears, turning the shaving rash purple.
“Yes,” I said. “The fact is, Brian, you’ve been making an awful fool of yourself. We’ve all been having a good laugh about your behaviour. It’s bizarre that you didn’t notice …”
“All right,” Bangs said in a tight voice. “Don’t go on.”
“Don’t get angry,” I said. “I’m only the messenger—”
“All right! Just shut up!” he shouted. “Shut up, will you?” He stepped towards me. I could see the beadlets of sweat on his nose. “Sheba likes me,” he said quietly. “I know she does.”
There are certain people in whom you can detect the seeds of madness—seeds that have remained dormant only because the people in question have lived relatively comfortable, middleclass lives. They function perfectly well in the world, but you can imagine, given a nasty parent, or a prolonged bout of unemployment, how their potential for craziness might have been realised—how their seeds might have sprouted little green shoots of weirdness, or even, with the right sort of antinurture, blossomed into full-blown lunacy. It occurred to me now, as I watched him sink down into his beanbag, that Brian Bangs was one of these people.
This realisation, if nothing else, ought to have deterred me from saying what I said next. But it didn’t. “Oh, Brian,” I cooed, “don’t tell me you have entertained hopes of reciprocation? That’s so
sweet
, Brian …”