Work in Progress

by Paul Thomas

  Her eyes were cloudy with arousal. ‘Recorded for posterity.’

  The first time is the one I revisit on sleepless nights when I ransack my memory for reasons to feel good about myself, as they say. Not that it was all downhill from there. Far from it. It was even better the second time. And better still the time after that. And so it went.

  It began with a grapple on the landing, bouncing off thin, ancient walls. How many frantic lovers had they framed over the centuries? We took the last flight of stairs two at a time. As I jabbed at the keyhole she dug into my clothes, snaking cool hands over my skin. We shut ourselves in and went at it again, panting and stumbling. Samantha shucked her jeans and bent over the table, a freeze-frame from the newsreel of our time, that helter-skelter barrage of violence and pornography. Late twentieth century man tossed and turned in anticipation of this moment, but only the lucky ones ever lived the dream.

  The days went by in a druggy swirl of wine, bedroom picnics and sexual feasting. There were grateful couplings in the cold dawns and slow, abandoned afternoons threaded with banter that had no meaning outside that time or place. And at night, before we slept, fierce embraces and whispers that she always shushed.

  On the second night I asked her to stay. Don’t ask me again, she said, so I asked her when she was leaving. She wouldn’t tell me. That way, she said, I wouldn’t hear the clock ticking.

  On the tenth day I woke up to find her dressed and packed for a flight departing in four hours. She didn’t want me to see her off; when she walked out the door that would be the end of it. Today was the first day of the rest of her American life.

  ‘What if I came too?’

  She shook her head. ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I can’t promise you anything and I wouldn’t want it on my conscience.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You ending up like me.’

  When it was time to go, she pulled my head down onto her shoulder. ‘Miss me,’ she whispered, ‘but only for a little while.’

  There was a postcard saying she’d arrived safely and France had saved its best for last. There was no return address but then I had nothing new to say.

  I had a week and a half in Paris with an all-American beauty, drunk most of the time and fucking her every which way. Everyone should do it once in their life.

  seven

  How many middle-aged men can claim to be tidier than their mothers?

  To be fair, our graphs have gone in opposite directions. When I was a child my mother was as dutiful as the next suburban housewife and I was as slack and careless a little shit as you’d find anywhere. It was only later, when her children left home and her husband’s eccentricity ceased to be endearing, that she decided there was more to life than worrying about what the neighbours would say.

  I’ve gone the other way: the older I get, the more anal I become. People who drop in on me out of the blue — a very select group — can enter my kitchen safe in the knowledge that it won’t be the usual heterosexual single man hell-pit where helpfulness or self-service risks setting off booby-traps of aged stench.

  My bookshelves would pass muster with the most demanding librarian. My household is organised and maintained with the iron discipline of the survivalist who’s prepared for every conceivable variation on doomsday. Whatever the time of the year, I could find appropriate clean clothing in pitch darkness. Not that I’d have to, since I have a powerful torch and a year’s supply of candles.

  If you think that’s depressing, wait until you see the bigger picture: doing chores is much easier than writing. I do all this domestic stuff — including pointless minutiae like assembling this stack of photos in strict chronological order — so that I have something to show for my procrastination.

  Samantha was and remains a high point, but I pressed on then as I press on now. I don’t spend every night like this, by the way — jacked up on brandy and cigarettes, stumbling down the back streets of my memory looking for a few laughs or a warm glow or something worth shedding tears over. I tire too easily — or perhaps I’m simply not serious-minded enough — to be a tortured, dark-night-of-the-soul insomniac.

  The next photo is of a crowd scene in a pub: twenty-odd shiny faces and tipsy grins. We’re no longer in la belle France. This is middle England at play down at the local, with its pints of Old Peculiar and large G & Ts and fat-titted barmaids — often from the colonies — and alcoholic publicans with actors’ smiles and threadbare patter. Seated bottom right is a middle-aged cove in a grey coarse wool pullover brandishing a pewter mug. He has a suspiciously full head of hair, railway clerk spectacles and what appears to be an off-cut from his pullover pasted on his upper lip. He’s obviously a lethal bore. Every English pub has one.

  I’m in the thick of it on account of being the popular new chum. Village pubs don’t attract new regulars, so to speak, every day so they get made a fuss of for a while. Their side of the bargain is to be, or at least appear, mildly interesting, contribute to the staple conversational threads, share the prevailing prejudices and show some talent for gossip.

  My arms are around my landlords, Jim and Becky Page, whose granny flat became vacant when Granny Page was run over on the High Street — the village’s first recorded pedestrian fatality, according to the bore. He was, of course, writing a history of the village and never let slip an opportunity to ‘compare notes with a fellow scribbler’.

  Paris was never quite the same after Samantha. Or after Patricia for that matter: without her allowance, the apartment was an essential I couldn’t really afford. Anywhere decent in London would’ve been as much of a squeeze, hence the granny flat in Berkshire. It was forty minutes to Waterloo and now that Thatcher had the unions on the run, the trains only stopped for mechanical problems, leaves on the tracks and winter.

  England also offered the prospect of a slightly healthier income. A couple of journalists I knew had gone up in the world while I’d been in Paris and were able to put some freelance work and even the odd junket my way.

  Which brings us to this photo of me knee-deep in the waters of the Arabian Gulf. It’s not entirely flattering: my tan has gone the way of everything else I acquired in France and I’m not in racing condition. The love handles — all those pints in the Woodlark — are the advance guard of the middle-aged ooze I now struggle to contain.

  Not that these lapses from the beau ideal seem to trouble my companion, who has a proprietorial arm around my waist. Her eyes are concealed by sunglasses but there’s a lip-smacking appreciation to her grin. She’s Kate O’Toole, London correspondent of a Sydney newspaper and a co-junketeer.

  These press trips always commence with a whiff of adventure, especially when the ice is broken in the first-class cabin. I was sat next to Kate, who signalled her intentions by calling for more champagne before the plane had left the ground. She was the same age as me or, to use the glass half-full approach, at or near her sexual peak. We swapped condensed life stories. Sydney-born and bred, she’d joined the paper straight from school and clawed her way to the middle. Her reward for five bruising years on the news desk was the much-coveted London posting and the privileged, plagiaristic existence of the foreign correspondent.

  Next morning we toured the new airport terminal and the new hotel and the new conference centre, gathering a wheelbarrow load of PR bumf about the go-ahead emirate, this oasis of air-conditioned comfort and agreeable living in a dry expanse. Later we were strapped into jeeps and bounced around the desert, a pointless, jarring exercise intended, presumably, to ram home the message of civilisation imposed on a hostile terrain.

  Throughout this ordeal Kate and I consolidated the rapport we’d established in that luxurious bubble eight miles high. That night at the team dinner she seized control of the seating arrangements to ensure that we sat thigh to thigh. There’s a school of thought which holds that one shouldn’t contemplate marrying a woman who feels you up under the table within twenty-four hours of being introduced,
especially when the signs — her adroitness coupled with her ability simultaneously to hold up her end of a conversation with a third party and cope with rack of lamb — suggest you’re not the first man she’s handled during a dinner party.

  But I am, after all, a bohemian.

  Not that we rushed into the registry office nearest to Heathrow. First we had to cohabitate, like any sensible couple.

  A month after the junket I moved out of the granny flat into Kate’s smart, employer-subsidised terrace in Barnes, across the road from the Thames. She had a year to go on her posting and, while hopeful of an extension, was determined to make the most of it, so all freebies were gratefully received: restaurant openings, first nights, inaugural flights, Lords, Wimbledon, Henley, Ascot and the Glorious Twelfth. We weren’t the first couple of freeloading — some of Fleet Street’s big guns made us look selective — but we did the Antipodes proud.

  Kate was easily dispirited by domestic routine and therefore appreciative of my solid and uncomplaining contribution to the running of the household. She felt it more or less balanced out the disparity in our incomes and who was I to disagree? I’d landed on my feet, enjoying a standard of living far beyond my means courtesy of a lover who seemed to think she was the lucky one. Kate was good company, robust and cheerful, albeit with a tendency towards comic self-dramatisation that wasn’t always in sync with my state of mind, especially after a less-than-productive day. Socially she was a throwback to the seventies, when women matched men drink for drink in the spirit of anything-you-can-do. (By now we were on the cusp of the neurotic nineties, the health craze was under way and one was starting to come across people who regarded eating as a necessary evil and three glasses of wine as a cry for help.) She was a fine-looking woman fully made up and in a certain light and I liked her. I liked her a lot.

  Kate’s late-night telephone lobbying was all in vain: Sydney was calling. Down there at head office the politicking surrounding the succession had degenerated into a frenzy of back-stabbing and brown-nosing and her bosses were not prepared to provoke a mutiny by giving her an extension.

  She’d adopted a quasi-religious faith in the power of positive thinking that precluded even the sketchiest consideration of what she — we — would do if she didn’t get her way. Having failed to prepare herself for the worst, she bore the full impact of it.

  After a long day, when she didn’t have the energy to put on a brave face, her misery pervaded the house like a musty smell. She blamed her tears on a debilitating period and rows with the editors in Sydney. This was a smokescreen and a pretty wispy one: Kate had sharp elbows, a leathery hide and could throw tactical tantrums with the worst of them; she’d held her own in the never-ending cat-fight of daily newspaper journalism for almost two decades. I was quite touched.

  Whereas Samantha, once bitten, twice shy, wouldn’t commit to another relationship, Kate could hear the faint, sinister rustle of time slipping away. She’d been around the track more times than she cared to count, picking up a few trophies and walking away from a few pile-ups, but that was a young person’s game and she wasn’t getting any younger.

  Our conversations about Down Under hadn’t got past the convict/sheep shagger childishness that passes for trans-Tasman rivalry so she had no particular reason to think I’d want to go with her. What she didn’t know — because I hadn’t told her — was that I was giving serious thought to tagging along.

  Serge’s treatment of Samantha (and hers of me, to a lesser extent) had borne out that ugly and depressing truth of human relationships that the less you have to lose, the stronger your position. With Kate, the balance of power and vulnerability was in my favour. This metaphor of competition and conflict didn’t do justice to my feelings for her, of course, but if I was going to ride on her coat-tails, I needed to be sure that she would like what she saw when she looked over her shoulder.

  Then there were the practical considerations. I’d become accustomed to a lifestyle that would evaporate like a dream when Kate left. Or, to look at it another way, I’d got used to not having to worry about money. The mere thought of going back to penny-counting and rationing and sweating on cheques mysteriously becalmed in the postal system and ‘what if?’ scenarios culminating in tube-station beggary and sleeping under bridges — ‘tramp-dread’ to borrow a term coined by a savvy and justly celebrated writer who needn’t have worried — made me tremble with nausea.

  Finally, there was the professional calculation. After a decade in Europe my career had stalled and I was in danger of drifting into that limbo to which competent tradesmen and unmarketable lady writers are consigned. I’d gained a modest reputation but hadn’t taken the next step. Neither the literati nor the trend-watchers nor the proudly philistine bottom-liners thought I was worth keeping an eye on.

  I was a little fish in a big pond and that was unlikely to change. Naturally I put this down to the literary establishment’s snobbish disregard for colonials. In Australia I’d be a big fish in a little pond. In that respectful environment I would regain momentum and produce big work. Eventually London would be forced to acknowledge my achievements and I’d return in triumph, armed with a blacklist of every talentless hack who’d ever underrated me or placed an obstacle in my path.

  This plan contained a major flaw in that if there’s anywhere in the world where the creative endeavours of New Zealanders are taken less seriously than they are in London, that place is Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. But I didn’t know that then. From my lofty European expatriate perspective I was making the same patronising assumptions about Australia as Australians do about New Zealand.

  But there was one Australian who valued this minor novelist from the land of the long flat vowel. Seldom have I caused such joy as the night I took Kate to the local Italian and told her, over a platter of antipasto and a bottle of Sangiovese, that if she wanted me to go with her, I would.

  Even as my thoughts turned to a new life in the sun somewhere between the sparkling sea and the burning bush, the old world was limbering up for one last laugh at my expense. A week before we left, I heard from a friend from my Patricia period. In a roundabout way, via the editor of a literary magazine, because the friend had become an ex-friend soon after Patricia got back to London and began spreading word of my swinishness. The third-hand message was that Patricia had heard on the grapevine that I was leaving and she wanted to meet. This was our first communication since the note saying she never wanted to see me again. Three years had passed but it could have been ten. Samantha aside, I spent my emotional capital carefully and wasn’t sentimental about my investments. When they ceased to provide an adequate return, I offloaded them, forgot about them and looked around for my next flutter.

  The proposed rendezvous was midday two days hence in one of those enclosed, residents-only street parks in Knightsbridge. It was such an oddball place to meet that my active imagination went hyper: maybe a couple of loping, feral West Indians would be pre-positioned in the shrubbery with a hundred quid in their back pockets, primed to give me a retributive pasting. On second thoughts, perhaps not West Indians: Patricia wouldn’t be a party to racial stereotyping. She did, however, have an older brother who’d been in the army. She’d often denounced him as a fascist buffoon but that was when she had no need of his dark skills.

  Try as I might, I couldn’t quite sell myself on the notion that Patricia was luring me to my comeuppance, whether courtesy of the Brixton Yardies or the Scots Guards. On the other hand, how likely was it that after three years of icy estrangement she wanted one last look before I left the hemisphere? I supposed it was conceivable that the silly little goose still burned a candle: she’d tried burying herself in work, she’d tried running wild with a different man every week, she’d tried drink and she’d tried drugs but she just couldn’t get Max Napier out of her system.

  It’s possible that I looked in the mirror as this train of thought trundled to the end of the line and decided that, when you looked at me from Patricia’s po
int of view, it wasn’t so hard to understand.

  I was punctual. The gate to the street park was locked, which made sense: how else could it be residents only? It occurred to me, with a spasm of envy, that if Patricia lived in this imposing street deep in the heart of Knightsbridge, she’d made a soft landing on the rebound. And if her principles were now rubbery enough to allow her to move in with some sharky financier, why should she have a problem employing Jamaican muscle?

  Patricia was fashionably late. She’d grown her hair and put on weight, enough that an outfit intended to disguise the fact could not do so. Her complexion had lost its girlish softness and she had an interesting fashion accessory: an infant in a stroller.

  She stopped a few metres away and tossed me a key. There was nothing in her expression to support the last-lingering-look theory. I opened the gate and stood aside.

  The child looked to be female but toddlers were largely a mystery to me; they’re thin on the ground in Bohemia. She had blonde curls and blue eyes and examined me even more stonily than her … her what?

  I pointed. ‘Yours?’

  ‘You mean to say you can’t see the resemblance?’

  The child had pleasantly rounded features but even I knew they were pretty standard. And, as mentioned, Patricia was a green-eyed brunette.

  ‘Well, since you ask, not really.’

  ‘Of course she’s mine — why else would I be traipsing around with her? Or did you think that without you as a mentor I’d been reduced to nannying?’

  She pushed the stroller over to a park bench and unbuckled her daughter, who tottered to and fro, plonked her backside down in a puddle and burst into tears. After a couple of minutes of lavish concern the racket ceased as abruptly as if Patricia had found a switch. She sat on the bench dandling her daughter on her knee.