Peace Talks

by Tim Finch

  I do this sometimes, I have noticed: imply awkwardness where none exists save for my implication of it. It avoids greater awkwardness further down the road, is all I can say for myself. But that doesn’t alter the fact that I arrived at the restaurant a bundle of excruciation. I conveyed it in every knotted fibre of my being. That was clear from Josephine’s elaborately wrought manner towards me. She was immediately and ever at pains. Fastidious to a fault in avoiding any possibility of misunderstanding. Not that we did. Either of us. Misunderstand. We understood perfectly. Where we stood. The nature of this evening, that is.

  She kept this … this … this … up all evening. I played my part, but this was my first time. She had been here before. It must have been immensely wearying. Why had she agreed to this dinner? I kept thinking.

  But then, why had I?

  A word about the restaurant. Though Jean had played matchmaker, as it were, I was not staying with her and John, which I often do. And for some reason none of our other friends was able to accommodate me. Which was fine. I was only in town for a night on business so I put up in a hotel. For reasons that I don’t need to explain, I was not about to invite Josephine to dine at the hotel, even though it has an excellent restaurant. But I might have booked a hundred and one different places, some of which – before you jump in: Not one of our favourites, surely? – I have eaten at, or come to like, or have even opened, since you died.

  Stop.

  The thought floors me. This is happening more and more, of course. Places, events, experiences that separate us in space and time – me here and now and you … where, when? So far away, suddenly. And for ever. Out there. Nowhere. Worlds devoid. You don’t exist in any of them. You don’t exist at all in any sense that means anything to me. All this? Is just conjuring on my part. Look! You are here. But I can step right through you. It’s as if you aren’t there.

  And don’t give me heaven or transcendence or subatomic particles strewn across the universe or beyond – or any of that stardust. Or at least, don’t give it by way of comfort before the fact. Don’t make me contemplate an eternity of nothingness or indeed of bliss. There may be immense comforts in it, but they are immanent to the state. Teetering on the lip, there can only be dread and recoil. And you are not down there, or out there, or nowhere. There is no you. There only was. I am learning to live with that, but there will always be these lapses, these heart-lurching falls through trapdoors.

  Resume.

  But even these places unconnected to you seemed wrong somehow. I wanted to meet Josephine in a place to which I had no connection at all. So I booked a table at a restaurant new to me. It was recommended by a colleague. And that was a mistake too. The restaurant was fine. But I had introduced a clandestine note to the evening. Shades of assignation. We were somewhere we wouldn’t be spotted. Though if we were spotted, so what? Yet another thing.

  ‘You know why Jean suggested this?’ Josephine asked. We had been seated at our table; water and wine had been ordered. ‘Because I am a widow and you a widower.’

  This coincidence of grief, Josephine explained, was the necessary first condition for her to be exposed to an evening of this sort. (She was immediately on eggshells here. Pointing something out; implying nothing by it. The teeth of my smile had something of the quality of glass or ice that might shatter if it had to keep up this surface brilliance for too long.) Friends were heedful on her behalf, Josephine continued, but a fellow initiate was assumed to be a relatively ‘safe bet’. At the very least, there would be something to talk about at that difficult ice-breaking stage. (The stage at which we were, though I must say I was warming to this woman.) To take one example: one’s new friend would be less taken aback if one were to run howling to the Ladies if some chance remark was to set one off.

  This opener was funny and well-delivered. And I guessed that Josephine had trotted it out more than once. I knew from Jean that Josephine had been a widow for five years, so she had three years on me. At this stage, it was showing.

  The wine arrived. I suggested she taste it as I had chosen the bottle at her behest. She nodded her assent to the wine waiter after the minimum amount of fuss, which I liked. We chatted about this and that. The starters arrived. We started on them.

  Josephine’s late husband, Stephen, had been in a wheelchair, she explained. Not at the end, not as a result of his final illness or injury, but from the beginning, from before the time she met him and fell in love. This information she volunteered matter-of-factly, as if an able-bodied woman falling for a paraplegic man was nothing remarkable, which – to me at least – it still is.

  To my shame – my added shame, perhaps – the next thought that came to my mind was how the sex was accomplished. I recalled an incident during my student days when a friend observed of a couple he knew – the man was notably tall, six-six at least; the woman as notably short, no more than five-one – ‘Here comes team infeasible sex.’ How, my friend and I speculated, long into the evening, were organs and orifices aligned given this foot and a half difference. The conundrum was a source of inordinate hilarity to us. Josephine and her late husband’s feasibility issues were of a different order, of course, and – more to the point – none of my business. But I was musing on them nonetheless, and not paying much attention to what Josephine was saying, when she threw in that Stephen was latterly bedridden, which prompted – even more inopportunely – mental images of her servicing in some way whatever needs he might still have had in that department in his latter-day state.

  I pulled myself up. (Servicing? I know.) It was most inappropriate to be thinking along such lines as Josephine, most movingly I realised now – now that I was listening to what she was telling me – spoke of her husband’s painful last year. And yet, when I reflect on it, I do wonder if by bringing a bedridden Stephen to the table, as it were, Josephine wasn’t banishing once and for all any prospect of bed and what might go with it. Not only the imminent prospect but the inherent one too. It had that effect on me, anyway. What I hadn’t been anticipating I certainly wasn’t now. Belt and braces, you might say.

  It was perhaps rather hard on Stephen, however, for I now had an image of him which was firmly lodged in my mind. I couldn’t shift it. Not even as Josephine went on to describe him in his prime, albeit wheelchair-bound, setting up and running a highly successful advertising company and finding time on the side to write a couple of plays, one of which I realised we had seen, at the Donmar or the Almeida or somewhere. Greece, Lightning! – remember? The title if nothing else, in my case.

  Of course, Josephine had heard of you – and because of your work and not just your murder. She handled that as well as anyone, incidentally. Starting with a well-judged level of condolence; then avoiding the trap of suggesting your ‘legacy’ must be some comfort to me. (It is and it isn’t, but I don’t like it to be assumed. She, I guess, must have Stephen’s plays thrown at her as some crumbs.) Thereafter she left me the space to say what I wanted to say about your death (not much), and how I’ve been coping since (even less). That led me to share a few memories of our life together and indeed of your life and career independently of me. Only then did Josephine come back in with some standard, but obviously sincere, observations of her own about you, and the impact of your work. She had had some mental health issues. (Doesn’t everybody these days?) Depression, anxiety attacks. (Me too, I didn’t add.) She didn’t dwell on them. (Credit to her for that.)

  At the end of this exchange, I observed, as now seemed to be required, that while we had both heard of the other’s spouse, and they had doubtless heard of each other, the two of us were the unknown ones, the unsung partners.

  We laughed cautiously at this thought. Neither of us wanted it in any way to imply destiny, a sense of a winding path leading to a fateful meeting. There was just a certain bond, that was all. The evening was turning out all right.

  Then it took a turn for the worse.

  First, Josephine expanded at some length on how Stephen’s forceful per
sonality, his dominant presence, and towards the end, his care needs, had been stifling for her, for all that she loved him very much. She had, she confessed, enjoyed a certain liberation in more recent years – the years after her initial, devastating grief had abated. A career as a model – given up shortly after marrying Stephen, when she had her first child – had been resumed with considerable success, there now being a ‘vogue’ for ‘mature’ women to model clothes that only women of their years, and only some of them, could afford. She named a few magazines she had appeared in, Vogue being one of them, and I did a reasonable job, I thought, of sounding fascinated, this being an aspect of life that I do not find remotely fascinating, in fact.

  I didn’t do well enough, though, for there was suddenly a distinct coolness in the air. She assumed a pouty expression (not unattractive; one could see how she would have looked as a young woman). She had talked about being a fashion model and I had assumed an air of superiority. I had come over all senior diplomat. She had expected better of me. None of this spoken, of course, just intuited by me from the smouldering sulk.

  Then she asked me what I did and – touché, one might say – wheeled out her own impression of someone trying to look interested when it is clear they couldn’t be less so. Worse, she insisted on making her own observations on the conflict, about which – to be brutal (it was getting to that stage) – she was woefully underinformed. I nodded along most uncomfortably and I don’t doubt some of my exasperation – though I hope not contempt – surfaced. The coolness had become a hard frost.

  The mains had arrived and we were well through the first bottle of wine. (My doing, almost entirely.) I would have liked to have ordered another, but I didn’t want to add a marked differential in the consumption of alcohol to the knot of complications that were making the evening such an ordeal. The result was that I faced, I calculated, a good hour with only half a glass of Merlot and the cold comfort of fizzy water to sustain me. I might just get away with a dessert wine, I thought. Though it was perhaps preferable if we skipped desserts. Then there was brandy with the coffees, if we didn’t skip those too. Suddenly, the prospect of a solo nightcap back at the hotel assumed immense consolatory proportions. I would laugh about all this then, I thought, almost weeping as I did so.

  But I have been skirting around the issue long enough. Yes, Josephine was a model. And yes, I suppose I did just casually drop that into the conversation as if it was neither here nor there, as if I am in the habit of having dinner with models. No big deal. No great shakes.

  It wasn’t like that, of course. This was my first time. And yes, I was struck, as anybody would be, by how very good-looking she was. Good-looking, I should add, in that way models tend to be, even ‘mature’ ones. (All this spoken from the perspective of someone who is no expert in models, I might add – any false impression in this regard now having been removed, I trust.) Luminous skin, feline bone structure, good posture. She was pencil slim too, and her hair, even to my untrained eyes, looked as if it was well attended to. I pictured her at the hairdresser’s every other day, which I guess counts as work in her line of business. But there was one thing about her hair that I found rather off-putting. It was long and lustrous, but old-lady grey. White, almost. I understand this is the fashion. But, as I say, I didn’t care for the look.

  What colour was your hair? Is there a colour called dirty blonde? It rings bells, yet they surely don’t call it that on the label and I know, in later years, your colour was coming out of a plastic bottle. Or being applied by your hairdresser. What was his name? Something almost comically apt, as I recall. Raimondo or something? This colour was your natural colour, the colour of your hair in youth, or young womanhood – when I first met you – which was a browny/blonde, just right for your unfussy, not-too-conscious-of-itself, mussed-up sort of beauty. Anyway, I’m sure I didn’t say nearly enough how nice, how lovely, your hair looked in later years. You weren’t a great one for those type of compliments, but even so.

  Now, to answer your question – implied if not stated – no, I didn’t ‘fancy’ Josephine. A hideous word and concept. And it wasn’t just the hair. She was obviously attractive, but I wasn’t attracted to her. What I was, I will admit, was flattered. First, that Jean considered me in some sense a ‘match’ for her obviously beautiful friend, and second, that Josephine appeared to feel the same. It wasn’t that she had seen a photograph of me in advance or anything. (I sincerely hope not, anyway; I hadn’t seen a photograph of her. At the risk of labouring the point, it wasn’t to be that sort of evening.) Rather it was that she hadn’t shown any sign on first seeing me – an undisguisable flinch, a just perceptible grimace – that she felt she had been set up with someone who wasn’t in her ‘league’ looks-wise. And that was a boost to my ego, for if she was a ‘9’, or at worst an ‘8’, that made me (don’t laugh) a solid ‘7’, surely?

  Oh, surely!

  I make myself sound rather foolish, I realise; a vain old man totting up the points. Poring over leagues and matches. All I can say is that it is nice, once in a while, to be reminded that I am still attractive. Didn’t you used to say I grew more attractive as I got older? Not to you, specifically, though of course … (Hole: stopping digging.) But generally. Generally? Friends had observed. Which friends? Never mind. Much laughter. One of those memories that hurt and heal at the same time. I am pleased to say some of the old twinkle is back. But bereavement takes its toll on all that: on one’s looks, one’s self-esteem, one’s confidence.

  There was of course that period. (Do I want to go there? Not really, but I feel I must be unsparingly honest.) There was this period, then – not in the first few weeks or months, but after that, in many ways the darkest period – when there was this sexual charge that surrounded me. This was nothing to do with me being an attractive older man that some of your friends might have quite fancied. It was nothing to do with me being an objective ‘7’. It was electrical, chemical. It was wanton.

  Your murder was a big part of it. This macabre celebrity of ours. You a celebrity in death; me a celebrity in grief. To some women, the combination of vulnerability and fortitude I showed in coping with your death bestowed aphrodisiac potencies. A weak man exploits that. Or falls victim to it. Much the same thing in the end.

  It gets worse – some of them, I swear, wanted to sleep with you, as much as me. They wanted you to be in the bed with us – or, at least, to commune with you through me. Did I just imagine your name being shouted out? Probably. I was pretty out of it too. The whole business had a delusional, not to say delinquent, atmosphere about it. It was the most fucked-up fucking, which language tells its own story. Pick-ups, one-night stands – drunken invariably; groupies one might almost say. Preying on me at my most vulnerable, but it worked both ways. The sex was ravenous, animal, but not without tenderness and compassion. It doesn’t make it any better – still worse, perhaps – but there were tears and hugs afterwards. Lonely people comforting each other as best they could.

  But I won’t pretend that I hated myself as a result. Well, I did and I didn’t. I thought, how it would look? To you, yes, but also – God help me – to the public. Sordid, I thought, and so I felt a bit sordid. Disloyal, and so I felt a bit disloyal. But I also felt a sense of release. I needed it. Something – no need to go there – was pent-up, ready to explode. These women obliged. Was I doing something wrong? Maybe, but there were no consequences. I just walked away, night after night.

  This is how and why men cheat, I thought. It is much more about the opportunity than the desire. For this short period, I had opportunities, I took them, I don’t – let me say it again – regret it. Yet after a while I stopped. Though it would be more honest to say it stopped. There were offers still. But far fewer. Whatever had surrounded me – the charge, the aura, the miasma – had dispersed. I was having to work harder suddenly. Or rather, I would have had to, had I been minded to, which I was not suddenly. I was more my old self now. A sense of equilibrium had returned. Did I want to ris
k rejection and humiliation in order to sleep with this or that woman? I was appalled at my previous recklessness, if not the sex itself. That, in a way, it had helped. Though, I won’t insult anyone’s intelligence by suggesting it was a necessary part of the healing process.

  For what remained of the dinner – we both passed on desserts but had coffees – I enjoyed being in the company of this attractive woman, of being seen with her, albeit by nobody I knew – which fact I now slightly regretted. I imagined these fellow diners thinking, perhaps even saying, ‘What an attractive older couple.’ And the notion that we were a couple didn’t matter now, for only strangers looking on and seeing two people well-matched in looks but in nothing else could have leapt to such a conclusion. Nothing was going to come of this evening, that was settled once and for all. Josephine and I were not in any sense the other’s ‘type’. The whole enterprise, I realised, had been engineered by Jean because she was fully confident of that fact. The point of the evening was to allow me to feel precisely the sensation I was feeling now. We were easing into the home stretch. I had ordered that brandy and Josephine had joined me. Now that it was almost over there was no great rush.

  As we were waiting for our coats, a strikingly beautiful young woman came into the lobby area. She was on her own and took only a moment or two to locate the person she was looking for. Josephine. Her mother. It was not of course a chance running into. Josephine’s daughter was the backup, the get-out – in the event that I had misread all the signals. ‘You’re in town too, aren’t you?’ I could imagine Josephine saying on the phone. ‘So come along at, what, ten-thirty and say you thought we could share a cab home. Just in case.’ Josephine smiled a little sheepishly at being so transparent. I put out my hand and she took it. But she pretty much had to arch forward to kiss me on the cheek. She owed me that.