So, the calm waters of West Country life momentarily choppy. But we settled down. Just, both, feeling a bit differently, I suppose.
And I have sorted a computer problem for her, advised on upgrading her car, persuaded her to replace the spare room mattress, at my expense. I could see her thinking: does this mean you . . . plan to spend rather more time on it? I could feel myself thinking the same.
We have watched television together, and exchanged opinions. Alison has plenty of opinion; she has some odd aversion to story, to the very idea of something being made up, untrue. Documentary is her choice. Drama has her picking the thing apart—fair enough, criticism is healthy—but also dismissive because in the last resort she can’t believe in it. She concedes that hers is a minority view: “Just as well, or a lot of people would be out of work, including you.” But she says the problem for her is that it all seems so contrived, so tidy, so unlike life as lived. Ah, but that’s just it, I tell her—the need to find order where order there is not, the search for shape, for significance. She sighs. All right, I say, never mind—let’s watch Mary Beard on ancient Rome. Plenty of real life there.
I agree with her, of course. Life is a mess—a random muddle. Which is exactly why one is drawn to improving on it.
I have fiddled with this idea for a two-parter set in the Outer Hebrides—mystery with scenic accompaniment—I have considered that old comedy script, and junked it. I have made various phone calls, sent various e-mails, to no great effect. “Always good to hear from you, Barry . . . get back to you of course if . . .”
Well, it was ever thus. To the young Turks I am no doubt a superannuated hack. But to others I am an old pro with a creditable track record. So plow on—the only thing to do.
Ella called last night. Calling her mother, of course, not me. Long talk, they had, then Alison brought the phone: “Here, have a word with Ella.” So I did. Words, indeed. Effort made, on both sides.
She has a problem with me. Always did. We’ve never got together. And it’s my fault. My problem.
The story I shall never work on, of course, is my own. Ours. Alison’s, hers, mine. What a shame. There it is, with shape, significance. And sacrosanct. I wouldn’t go near it.
I’ve told Alison I’m cooking supper tonight. A salmon thing I do. So she can come back from her day of preserving this historic landscape and put her feet up. Chicken liver pâté for starters from the deli in the local market town, grapes for pudding, bottle of Sauvignon.
The local market town is a pretty one-horse place, the high street stationary because everyone knows everyone else and is stood there talking to them. Some copy here, surely, I’ve thought, but actually it’s been done to death, from Midsomer Murders upward, or downward. No, get the shopping and run.
People live here. All their lives. And don’t, it seems, go stir-crazy. Alison has, for a good deal of hers now. Nothing crazy about Alison, that’s for sure. Relentlessly normal, and all credit to her. Ella too. Level-headed young woman, she seems to be—in so far as I can say I know her. On the phone, I suggested lunch next time I’m in London. “Great,” she said. “Yes, let’s do that.” Neutral tone, I thought.
Four, she is, in my head—the memory image I cannot expel. Just four. Small figure up on that bridge. With Luke.
The salmon thing, and the Sauvignon, and afterward there will be a restrained tussle with Alison about whether we watch opening episode of new BBC drama series or whichever glamour-boy young academic BBC Four currently has tramping around Greek temples. Alison will win, and I shall wonder if maybe I have been in the wrong line of business. Any openings for an aging connoisseur of listed buildings in the West Country?
*
Last week I had a run-in with a London immigrant banker who has bought a sixteenth-century manor house and proposes to embellish the property with a conservatory extension, a games and cinema annex and a large swimming pool. It did occur to me that actually his outlook and aspirations were nicely in tune with the worst excesses of Tudor architectural vulgarity. Today we have planning laws to make sure that those are meticulously preserved.
Told Barry about him, who was much entertained, and in fact it is rather good to get home and unload the working day to someone. Barry is putting himself out to be . . . companionable. He has shopped, done some cooking, generally concedes TV program choice to me. We are behaving like, I assume, most married couples behave. I do not ask how long he plans to stay. He does not discuss his own day, which has been spent I suppose in pursuit of work, or brewing up ideas. His world has always been mysterious to me, and I know I’m a bit disdainful about it, can’t take it entirely seriously. All that endeavor—and money—in order to invent, to fabricate. And yes—I know, I know—divert and entertain. I have a blind spot, and am well aware of it.
Nevertheless—despite our conflicting outlooks—this time together has been not uncongenial. He helps out. He has sorted the recycling box on Thursdays, cooked some surprisingly good suppers. And there was that confession of mine over dinner at the Royal Oak. Confession? Revelation, rather, I suppose. Whatever—it put down a marker, somehow. Gave us both pause for thought. That I could say it, that he now knew about it.
Ella has never known, of course.
He and Ella talked, the other night. I saw to it—put the phone in his hand. There is not enough contact between them—a strained relationship. Ella shrugs: “Well, I’ve never seen all that much of him, have I? Always coming and going, when I was a child. Always a bit—oh, I don’t know—offhand.”
Offhand? Was he? I know what she means. He was never exactly fond with her.
I don’t want to know why but I do. There is always in his head what he thinks he saw, what he told me he saw. That day.
*
Quite a chat with my dad on the phone—he and Mum sound positively domestic, down there at hers. She didn’t once complain about him. And he proposes lunch with me in town at some point.
Yes, I will. Look, I don’t mind my dad—it’s just that I’ve always felt a bit—well, a bit out in the cold somehow. I’ve often thought it would probably have been different if there’d been two of us. If Luke had been there. It would have been children then—not just a child.
No, no—he wasn’t ill. He fell in a river. I don’t know how. Mum doesn’t talk about it, ever. Just one of those hideous accidents.
*
A whiff of some work. A murmur of interest in my fracking docudrama idea: “Get up a more detailed proposal and we’ll have a think . . .” So buckle down to it, Barry. Repainting of Alison’s garden shed will have to go on hold.
Trouble is, I seem to have gone right off work. Can’t get up a head of steam, heart not in it—all the clichés. Influence of Alison? Am I too becoming suspicious of made-up stuff?
All this introspection, down here—that’s the trouble. Oh, to hell with fancy language—too much mulling over, drilling down, staring into dark corners, hauling out things that were best left to fester. And none of that is made-up stuff. It’s life as lived—as was lived.
I keep seeing Alison back then. The early days. The Highgate house, things we did together, Ella being born—whoops, help, I’m a dad. But that was fine.
It should be possible to rewind—to go back to that point, wipe what came next and start again with a different story. One that might run entirely differently, in which Alison and I live—not happily ever after, who does that?—but in which we stay together, we learn to compromise, to adapt, to rub along comfortably enough. And Ella. And Luke.
A story that never reaches a particular day. A summer day. A charming summer day in Suffolk, sun with his hat on, the green grass of June, mayflies rising and falling above this delectable little river beside which we are having a picnic. The four of us.
We have eaten. Cold chicken. Salad. Fruit. Crisps for the kids.
I read the paper. Alison has a book. Ella and Luke are
pottering about, trying to catch a grasshopper.
And then . . . why? Why do we start suddenly to argue? About what? I don’t know. Suffice it that things go wrong for some reason, and we become immersed in the to and fro “I did . . . ,” “No, you didn’t . . . ” We are focused on each other, distracted, we don’t notice.
We don’t notice that the children are no longer pottering a few yards away.
Until I look up, look round—where are they?
Look toward the bridge, the little stone bridge that arches over the river. And there they are, they are on the low parapet, they have somehow climbed up, they are sitting there, their legs hanging above the water.
I stand up. Alison is up too, calling to them. And as I stand, I see. I am looking, as her small arm goes to his small shoulder.
And pushes.
*
There are times when I don’t think of it for days, weeks. Don’t see it. The day has not gone away, impossible, it is still lodged there, always, always, but it stops playing out. I am able to escape the sight and sound of it.
It will come back.
Such lovely weather, that weekend. The weekend break in Suffolk. We have been to the beach at Southwold—bucket and spade afternoon for the children. Today we explore elsewhere, picnic all packed up in the boot of the car, we find this lovely river spot. Complete with . . .
“Packhorse bridge, that is,” said Barry. “From olden times and all that. Most picturesque.”
I’ll see it forever.
Ella complained because the crisps weren’t the kind she liked best. There was a fuss, briefly.
I remember the mayflies. The sun on the mayflies—bright above the water.
I remember the man fishing on the far bank, just near the bridge.
What was the quarrel about? I’ve no idea, no idea at all. Had it been latent from earlier that day—some discontent brewing, ready to flare? Some small provocation? I don’t know, don’t know. I know just that we sat there on that sunny summer river bank and fought about something—an argument that blinded us to everything. To the day, to the children.
He said he saw first. And so there is what he thinks he saw. What he told me he saw.
But he didn’t. We saw together.
I look up—see them. Oh my God, up on the parapet, they have climbed and there they sit—I am on my feet, I see her clutch his shoulder, he is slipping, she tries to pull him back. Then I see, I see . . . I see him fall. I see the fisherman throw down his rod, jump in the water. I see Barry running.
And I know now that it has always been there for him. What he thinks he saw. Despite what I have told him. Despite what the man said who jumped in.
How can something have happened twice over? One way for him, another for me?
*
You rather liked my dad? Well, stone the crows. Polar opposites, I’d have thought, him and you. Television odd-job man and rising star economist—future Governor of the Bank of England. Oh, you may laugh, but it’s far from impossible. We’ll see. At least, I hope it’ll be we.
I can’t get over how well it went. First time I’ve been down there with the two of them together, and it was all right. Largely thanks to you, mind. And if you like my dad, my mum really liked you. Purring, she was. I could see her comparing you to my ex, and poor Sam was wiped out—game, set and match.
Thank goodness there’s a new mattress on the spare room bed. That’s where my dad is normally, but there he was obligingly moving himself to the Put-U-Up in my mum’s study. He seems to have been at hers ages now—no work, I suppose. One didn’t like to inquire. But there he was, helping out with this and that, chopping logs for the fire, making that sticky toffee pudding—oh dear, the indigestion, but well meant, clearly. And Mum just accepting it all, unconcerned, or so it seemed.
Well, no. They can’t seem like just any other older married couple to me. Too much history.
Dealing with the history? Can you deal with history? Hmmn . . . I wonder. I wouldn’t know—I haven’t had that much. And anyway I suppose I don’t really know what theirs is. Only the surface stuff—that they haven’t been all that much together, for a long time. Heaven knows what else—I’d be the last to know, I imagine. And I’ll tell you another thing, my dad was going out of his way with me. Distinct attempts to make contact.
Oh, you noticed too. And do you know, I rather liked it. And my mum did too—I could sense little currents of approval. I’ll almost say—complicity. One had this feeling they’ve been talking to each other. Well, so I should hope—I mean, they’ve been spending a certain amount of time together, on and off, for thirty years. But talking differently, somehow. I don’t know—I just felt there’d been a bit of—oh, discussion of some kind. Something sorted, even. End of story, as it were.
What story? Well—how would I know?
Theory of Mind
Martin is a cognitive archaeologist. His professional interest is in how minds operated in the distant past. He is not the kind of archaeologist who gets his hands dirty, troweling away somewhere. Martin mostly works in front of a screen, staring at images. His subject is Paleolithic art; his thoughts, day after day, are far away with Aurignacian culture, with Magdalenian culture, as he considers the floating forms of horses and deer and bears and aurochs and bison, from Lascaux and Altamira and Chauvet. His head is in a cave, metaphorically speaking, though in fact it is in a three-bedroom semi in Walthamstow, where his partner Harriet is downstairs preparing supper and shouting at him that it is time to eat.
Harriet is a copy editor. She too spends much of her time in front of a screen, putting to rights the raw version of someone’s book, adjusting punctuation, correcting spelling, rescuing the author from semantic solecisms, reminding him or her that he or she has already said all this back on page 130, pointing out that he or she appears to have a kind of verbal hiccup when it comes to the overuse of certain words.
“Supper! Martin! Come on!”
Harriet met Martin because she copy-edited his first book. Author and copy editor do not normally meet; e-mails fly to and fro. But in this instance there was a little party for the publication, and Harriet was invited. She had found the book interesting and so was vaguely curious about the author. She noticed at once that Martin was not enjoying the party at all. He was embarrassed by it—not a party sort of man. He stood there, clutching a glass, receiving compliments on the book, and clearly wishing he were somewhere else. Harriet rather liked the look of him; not specially handsome, thin scholarly face (how can a face be scholarly? But they can, they can), thick hair flopping forward, spectacles, and, behind them, brown eyes that, she observed, had noticed her.
She introduced herself. The eyes widened.
“Oh! I’d somehow thought you’d be a much older person . . .” Confusion now. Awkward. Taking hasty reinforcing gulp from his glass. “Well . . . Thank you so much for your work.”
“I enjoyed it,” she said. “And I don’t always.”
Harriet is not drop-dead gorgeous—dear me, no. But not bad, all the same. She is not the sort of girl who sends men weak at the knees, but there have been several who wobbled a bit. She has a good figure, she has been told. Pretty mouth, it seems. Her hair functions nicely—short, dark, glossy, neat. She is not too fat, except occasionally. She buffs up well, if she makes an effort.
Over the years, there have been long- and short-term arrangements with men. The short-term ones were—well, just that. The two long-term ones involved cohabitation with all the fallout: rent, bills, shopping, washing up, bathroom habits, television preferences, his friends and your friends. And, eventually, a terminal falling out. Harriet has no great regrets. She is quite good at being on her own, but, at the moment Martin hove on the scene, she was probably a soft touch—somewhat ready for someone new, perhaps the permanent someone new.
She left the party wondering. They had talked for quite a
while, until interrupted. He had seemed to be possibly enjoying himself a bit more.
And, a few days later, there was an e-mail. A faltering sort of e-mail, proposing that maybe she might, just a thought that perhaps, conceivably, it could be an idea to meet up for a meal. On Friday.
So thus it began. Over Thai chicken green curry he started to talk about the Paleolithic, about cave art, about the way in which the term art is itself an anachronism since those who created these images could not have been doing so with any understanding of the concept of art as we know it.
“The mind in the caves,” he said. “Those minds . . .”
“Martin,” she said. “I edited your book. I know about all that.”
He put down his knife and fork, looked at her. Shook his head. “Of course you do. Sorry. I’m afraid I . . . Oh, dear. The trouble is I . . .”
“The trouble is that you’re interested in what you do,” she said. “Which is fine. Real trouble would be if you weren’t.”
Indeed, indeed. Martin is interested in his work, in the attempt to penetrate the distant past. He is interested in the Paleolithic, in the wild life of the Paleolithic, in the nascent mind of Paleolithic man. He is interested in all this sometimes to the exclusion of all else, as on this occasion when for a moment it slips his mind that the young woman with whom he is eating a meal is the same person who has been adjusting his colons and his semicolons and advising him not to use the expression “I would argue that . . .” quite so often.
However, Martin is now interested also in Harriet, as she becomes interestedly aware.
He wonders if perhaps she would like to join him for a walk on Hampstead Heath. Next week. She does so. After that he suggests a day out on the South Downs. The day is had, and Harriet counters with the proposal of a film—fresh air is getting a bit monotonous. And so there is a film, and a supper at her place, and another; Martin’s interest is made evident in all the expected ways and now here they are, much later, in the three-bedroom semi in Walthamstow.
The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories Page 16