The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life

by William Nicholson

‘Ask around, perhaps. Better coming from you.’

  ‘I’ll try, certainly.’

  ‘Well, then.’ He stands. ‘Let me know what you come up with. Much appreciated.’

  With that he nods vaguely in her direction and leaves.

  Left alone in the lake house, scene of long-ago trysts, Laura finds herself in a strange mood.

  That’s all we want in the end, isn’t it? Someone who makes us happy.

  She thinks of Henry. As always when she conjures up a deliberate picture of him he’s on a walk, leaning into the wind, somewhere high on the Downs. He’s turning towards her, telling her something, his long arm sweeping over the valley below. Henry doesn’t just walk, he looks, he sees, he reads the landscape. And as always when she pictures him in this mode, striding along, eager words lost in the wind, she feels a clench of gratitude. He has given himself to her, there’s no other way to put it. That simple act of unwithholding is what makes her life possible. She will do nothing to hurt him, nothing to lose him.

  But does he make me happy?

  There are no gauges, no measures. How happy am I entitled to be? I have security, loyalty, kindness. Am I allowed excitement? Am I allowed ecstasy?

  The words sound ridiculous to her even as she frames them in her mind, as if they belong to a time now gone by, her youth, her twenties. But why should this be so? Sometimes she finds several days have passed and she can’t recall how she spent them, other than in the unnoticed round of domestic life, the breakfasts and the school runs, the trips to the supermarket, the suppers and the waiting for Henry to come home. She is living in a world without markers. She is adrift in a coastal mist, all sense of direction lost and all sense of time. Not a condition deserving of sympathy. And yet—

  There was a time when I would wait in all day for the phone to ring. I had a lover once whose voice on the phone made me tremble.

  I will not burn what remains of the greatest happiness I have ever known.

  She takes out Nick’s letter and passing the information from her eyes to her fingers without any conscious process of decision-making she taps out the numbers on her phone. Then she pauses, her finger on the send button.

  If I press send, it will begin again.

  What! Such vanity. Such melodrama. Nothing more than a phone call. The satisfying of curiosity. The chances are he won’t be there anyway.

  ‘Hello?’

  She recognizes the voice of an old friend from university days.

  ‘Richard? It’s Laura.’

  ‘Laura! Oh my God! It’s been too long. How are you?’

  ‘Not so bad. And you?’

  ‘We were just talking about you. That is so weird. How long is it? Has to be five years. How old are your children?’

  ‘Jack’s eleven now. Carrie’s nine.’

  ‘I don’t believe it. Hey, you’ll never guess who’s showed up here.’

  ‘Who?’

  Why am I pretending I don’t know?

  ‘Nick Crocker! Blown in from California. Hold on.’

  She hears his voice speaking to someone else. ‘It’s Laura Kinross. Do you want to say hi?’ So Nick has been keeping secrets too.

  ‘Laura? Nick’s right here. He’d like a word.’

  And there he is. The long-forgotten voice, entirely unchanged.

  ‘Laura? Is that you?’

  ‘Yes. It’s me.’

  Her heart bumps even as she keeps her voice neutral.

  ‘When do I see you?’ he says.

  No preliminaries as ever.

  ‘So what happened to you?’ she says.

  She doesn’t see him for twenty years and already she’s into the accusations. But he doesn’t even hear her.

  ‘Say where and when. I’ll be there.’

  She runs her diary through her head to scramble all other thoughts.

  ‘How about today week? Next Wednesday.’

  ‘How about tomorrow?’

  She has no idea what’s happening tomorrow except that it’s too soon.

  ‘Friday. We’ll give you supper. You can meet Henry and the children.’

  ‘Fine. Friday.’

  She gives him her address and phone number.

  ‘Right,’ he says. ‘Friday.’ And he’s gone.

  He never was good on the phone. Laura presses the end-call button and realizes she’s given him her mobile number, not the house line. She’s become two people. The other one, the secret one, is doing things behind her back.

  And yet what is there to be ashamed of? An old friend, a former boyfriend, is coming to supper with her family. Henry won’t mind. He’ll be curious to meet him.

  She goes on sitting in the derelict lake house absorbing the brief phone conversation. She begins to find contradictions. He implied he had only a few days in the country. So why send a letter? He could easily get her parents’ number from Richard. Why not phone them? If he’s staying with Richard, he must know her married name. Richard was at the wedding. So why write to her under her maiden name?

  I always knew you’d come back one day.

  This unbidden thought appals her. She thinks of Carrie and her crisis at school. Of Jack’s strange composition that Henry likes so much. Of Henry deep in the seventeenth century, explaining to her over dinner the sin of idolatry. The Puritans called the defacing of statues the sacrament of forgetfulness. Henry loves that.

  That’s all we want in the end. Someone who makes us happy.

  12

  At the end of term they parted to spend Christmas with their families. Saying goodbye at the station Laura told him, ‘Phone every day.’ Nick said, ‘Or write.’ He didn’t fully understand that he had become part of her. They had spent every night together since that first sleepless night, she was only fully alive when she was with him. The rest of the time she was waiting.

  They kissed and stood close, not speaking, their arms folded round each other. It was cold and they both wore heavy coats. She pressed her cheek against his cheek.

  On the train she experienced a wave of panic. She wanted to leave her seat, throw herself from the moving train, run back to him. He was fading, becoming insubstantial, only she could make him real with her warm touch. Then the terror passed, to be replaced by a sensation of listlessness. What did it matter where the train was carrying her? It carried her away from him. After Christmas there would be another train, which would take her back to him. The days between had no colour or distinction. Her life was in suspension.

  At home the change in Laura did not go unnoticed.

  ‘You’re pale as a ghost, darling. Are you ill?’

  ‘No, Mummy. I’m fine.’

  ‘I’m going to feed you up. Diana, we must feed her up.’

  ‘She might be anorexic,’ said Diana, a hopeful glint in her eye.

  ‘Of course she isn’t,’ said their mother, fearing that she was. ‘That’s a horrible thing to say.’

  ‘Is it?’ said Diana. ‘Sorry.’

  Diana found her later sitting on her bed in a dressing gown staring into space. She demanded to be told what was going on.

  ‘I met this man,’ said Laura.

  ‘And he’s messed you about.’

  ‘No. I just miss him.’

  ‘Christ, is that all? I thought at the very least you’d got pregnant and he’d dumped you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So what’s the problem?’

  ‘I said. I miss him.’

  ‘Well, I miss Hamish too. But nobody wants their life totally taken over. What’s this boy’s name?’

  ‘Nick. He’s not a boy.’

  ‘Are you sleeping with him?’

  ‘Of course I’m sleeping with him.’

  ‘All right, all right. Just checking. I hope you’re keeping up with the pills.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You could always go onto the rhythm method. That way you get a week off every month.’

  Diana thought this funny and a little shocking, but Laura didn’t react. The phone rang in
the hall. Laura jumped, and the blood drained from her face. She waited, trembling, for her mother’s voice to call up the stairs, but no call came.

  ‘Do you have a photograph of him?’ said Diana.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No picture to kiss at night?’

  ‘I have him.’

  Diana was silenced. She was also piqued. Laura’s malady was beginning to look like true love, and Diana did not allow Laura to be happier than she was herself.

  ‘So where is he now?’

  ‘With his family. In Highgate.’

  ‘Highgate? He’ll be out on the town, then. Still, what you don’t see can’t hurt you.’

  By the end of the second day no call had come and Laura was frantic. She called Nick’s home. He came to the phone.

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘Why didn’t you phone?’

  ‘I said I’d write. I have written.’

  ‘Oh, Nick. Letters take far too long. Tell me what you said in your letter.’

  ‘It’s different on the phone.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘You’ll get it tomorrow.’

  She realized with a sinking heart that he was not going to give her the consolation she craved. He had told her before that he was not good on the phone, but she had paid little attention. What was there to be good at? Now, with their first ever phone call, she was finding out. Without his smile, without his touch, his voice felt thin and far away. All she wanted him to say was I love you, I miss you. These few words would keep her alive until the post came tomorrow. But she dared not ask.

  There had grown up between them over the last two ecstatic months an understanding that their love was unlike other people’s love. There was a rightness in their coming together that was close to perfection. Therefore they never flaunted their happiness, and they never hoarded it. Something so special did not need to be put into words, nor could it be threatened by the attentions of others. They were united, they told each other, but they were free. No promises made or required. They had only to catch sight of themselves reflected in a shop window walking arm in arm, beautiful as angels, and they knew they were made for each other.

  How then could Laura say on the phone, ‘Tell me you love me’? Particularly when anyone passing the hall could hear every word.

  ‘So what are you up to?’ she said.

  ‘Nothing much. Putting up Christmas decorations.’

  ‘I just want it all to be over. I’m supposed to go to this party tomorrow. I think I’ll say I’m ill.’

  ‘No, you should go. Have fun.’

  How can I have fun without you? There is no fun without you. There is no life without you.

  ‘You wouldn’t say that if you could see the people round here.’

  ‘Oh, well. You know best.’

  ‘Honestly, Nick.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. Just me being silly.’

  ‘I told you I’m no good on the phone.’

  She relied on the closing phase of the conversation to extract something to sustain her. She lowered and softened her voice accordingly.

  ‘Better go. Good to hear your voice.’

  ‘And you.’

  ‘You know I love you.’

  ‘Me you.’

  And there it was.

  His letter came the next morning. She was waiting for the postman, and took it before anyone else saw it.

  Sweet you. My window looks over rooftops, distant trees, cold blank sky. In my mind I’m sitting with you before the hissing gas fire. Avocados and Beaujolais and bare feet. I should be working on the great work. Dark comes so early. London does darkness well, glitter more glamorous than daylight. How goes the daylight in Sussex? I picture stern lead-coloured waves rolling in to a deserted promenade. Chalk cliffs, seagulls, you in your long blue jersey, hair streaming in the wind. Because we’re apart I learn how close we are. More than close. I carry you in me like a part of myself. Does that make sense? Of course you’re not me, you’re you. My beautiful other. That sounds too possessive. We are each other’s other. Christ I don’t know. Drink to me only with your eyes and I will pledge with mine.

  She cried a little as she read the letter, without quite knowing why. She wanted so much to be with him again, it was an ache in her arms.

  After Christmas they were reunited in a remote farmhouse in Radnorshire. The house was entirely unsuitable for winter habitation. It had no electricity and no hot water, and its only source of heat was the fireplace in the kitchen. Here, wrapped in duvets, they warmed tomato soup on a kerosene camping stove and drank cheap red wine. They read Middlemarch aloud to each other by candlelight. For five days they had no visitors and went nowhere, except to the village shop in Painscastle for bread and matches.

  Nick found Dorothea’s decision to marry Casaubon incomprehensible.

  ‘She’s being a chump. Unless she’s after his money.’

  ‘She wants her life to have a greater purpose. I buy that. She admires him. She believes in his great work. I believe in your great work.’

  She was mocking him. She had discovered he liked it when she laughed at him.

  ‘I wonder what your great work will be. A thing of wonder, I’m sure. So you see, I believe in you.’

  Unspoken, ahead, the day in June when he would graduate, and she, two years younger, would be left behind. Sometimes he talked of Paris, or Florence, but to her such plans were meaningless. How could he go so far away from her?

  ‘This is my great work,’ he said, putting down the book. ‘You and me.’

  This was all she had ever wanted to hear.

  ‘I do love you, Nick.’

  He kissed her. Then beneath the duvet his hand felt for her body, ran down her flank to her thigh. His signal of desire at once awoke in her a thrill of response. She wanted him to want her, wanted him to crave her and be addicted to her. When they made love the sensations that flooded her body were overwhelmingly intense, but at the heart of the intensity was a fierce cry of possession.

  Enter me, push deep into me, find all you need in me, never leave. My darling, my only one, I have you now, you’re mine now.

  13

  On Wednesday afternoons all the main school who aren’t in matches or rehearsing the play are supposed to watch and cheer those that are but Toby Clore says who cares and it’s only old Jimmy on duty. He says he’s going down to the wood and you can come if you want. Angus is going and Richard Adderley so Jack says maybe he’ll go along too and they don’t seem to mind. The wood is out of bounds even on a non-match afternoon but Toby Clore doesn’t have much to say to Jack usually so Jack is excited to be included as well as nervous.

  Getting away is easy. Underhill is batting and has scored thirteen. Old Jimmy stands on the terrace watching the match and telling Mr Kilmartin how he’s become a part-time reporter, so Toby and the others just sort of mooch off down by the tennis courts as if they’re going nowhere in particular. Then once they’re past the big laurels Toby says ‘Go!’ and they dive through the trees and run. They run all the way down the track to the wood, and don’t stop till they reach the Drowning Pond, which is one of the reasons the wood is out of bounds. There’s a thick greenish scum on the surface of the water. If you poke a stick into the pond you never reach the bottom, which either means it has no bottom or that there’s soft sludgy stuff down there, which is just as creepy.

  There’s a dead branch lying half over the green water, quite a big branch, big enough to stand on. Angus stands on its end where it rests on the bank and Richard Adderley dares him to walk out over the water, if you can call it water. He takes one step, but the branch starts to sink and he jumps off quickly.

  ‘Loser,’ Richard Adderley says.

  So Richard Adderley has to show he can go further down the branch, which he does, but then as he jumps off his shoes go right into the slime because the branch dips under the kick of his jump.

  ‘Your turn, Jacko.’

  Jack does not wan
t to step onto that bobbing branch but he understands that he has no choice. Some token attempt must be made for the simple reason that the others have allowed him to come with them. If he does not walk the branch he must leave them and return to not watching the cricket match. None of this is spoken of course, or even barely framed as a thought. Just the way of things.

  He steps onto the end of the branch where it’s safe, and finds his balance. Even here the branch rocks a little. He wonders what the green slime feels like to touch, or far worse, to swallow. He takes one very small step, propelled forward even as he is held back, locked in fatalistic dread, doing what he does not want to do but must. Toby Clore isn’t even watching. Why hasn’t Toby walked the branch? But Jack knows the answer. Toby doesn’t need to prove that he’s a total banghead. This would be nothing for Toby. He would jump right into the green slime if he felt like it. Toby only ever does what he feels like. This is why Jack admires him so much, even though Toby is neither bigger nor cleverer than he is. He is just more free. There’s a crazy carelessness about him that is pure glamour. Toby Clore’s wildness speaks to Jack of possibilities beyond pleasing those in authority.

  Then Toby looks round and declares, ‘Let’s make the cows shit!’

  Off they run to the far side of the wood, leaving Jack on his branch, but he doesn’t mind because now he doesn’t have to walk the branch after all. He chases after them, panting some way behind them, heart singing with gratitude. They crawl through a barbed-wire fence, up a bank of nettles, into the springy hoof-pocked turf of the big tree-fringed meadow beyond. A herd of black and white cows grazes quietly on the far side, near a farm road.

  Jack has heard reports of this game but has never done it before. The other three, veterans all, form up abreast like the leading rank of an army column, and set off at a grand march across the meadow towards the cows. Jack catches up and falls into place on Angus’s left. They march in exaggerated style, making big slow steps, and swinging their arms high and stiff by their sides. Jack likes the march, because the four of them swing their arms in time, and this makes him one of them. The cows look up in mild surprise.