by James Lasdun
‘No!’
‘That would be intimidation,’ I said.
‘Seriously?’ Caitlin asked. ‘Just calling her up to ask what’s going on?’
‘It’s a risk.’
‘Wow.’ She shook her head. She was, is, somewhat unworldly in her interests, my wife, and as a result constantly being amazed by the world.
‘But does she actually know she’s harming you with this story?’
‘She has to know,’ Marco said.
Caitlin frowned into her wine. ‘I’m not getting a very clear picture of this person. Could you tell me more about her?’
Marco gave the same grave nod. I had a sense that, for him, the conversation had something of the quality of a rehearsal: an informal dry run for some sterner version of itself likely to occur somewhere down the line.
‘Well, she was this quiet girl from the Midlands. Grew up on a housing estate. No father around, mother worked for the council. Got into Oxford where she was apparently very shy and retiring. Came to London as a freelance journalist and began to realise she had something that made people want her around. Worked in print and radio for a couple of years, before moving into TV.’ He turned to me: ‘Didn’t your mother help get her that TV job?’
‘That’s right, she did.’
‘Anyway, that’s when I met her. She was assigned to me as a researcher. Actually, what she told me was she’d finagled the assignment. I was a desirable commodity then, professionally speaking. We worked very closely together, and we’d often go for a drink at the end of the day. She seemed a bit Sphinx-like at first but she turned out to have strong opinions and we had a sparring, mocking relationship that kept me on my toes. She used to call me a closet colonialist because in her opinion my embrace of third-world politics was just an update on Kipling – White Man’s burden, etcetera, with journalists as the new pukka sahibs. I’d defend myself furiously, but she was right, in a way, and I knew it, which was part of what attracted me to her. I was physically attracted too, obviously. I mean, she was gorgeous. She looked like a lioness, I used to think. She had this wide, wide face with a sort of distant smile as if she was dreaming about something simultaneously enjoyable and highly dangerous. I’d say for sure we both knew we were going to end up in bed sooner or later …’
The sun was going down behind the woods as Marco talked; lighting the hillsides opposite. I was half-listening, slipping off into my own memories of Julia. I mentioned that she’d been a presence in our house during my teens, but for a period she’d actually been something more in the nature of a fixture. My mother had befriended her, ‘taken her up’, as they used to say; inviting her to dinner in London or for the weekend in Sussex, connecting her with influential friends, bringing her along to first nights and private views. She was friendly to me, in the amused way of worldly young women with tongue-tied teenage boys. I didn’t see anything lion- or lioness-like about her. Physically, she reminded me of the Flora figure in Botticelli’s Primavera, with that inward look expressive of both bashfulness and sensuality, but there was certainly a fierceness about her – an air of intensely but privately pursued pleasure – that always intrigued me. And beyond this there was a radiance about her that, whatever its real cause, existed for me in my generally befogged condition at that time, as an idea of reprieve. It’s not an exaggeration to say that for me she incarnated the idea of joyous freedom that I believed life consisted of once you came through the long tunnel of adolescence. I had a crush on her, also.
5
Marco had planned to spend two nights with us, but the next morning at breakfast he asked me to drive him to the train station right away. He’d decided to fly to London. He’d already bought a ticket from JFK online, and just needed to pick up his passport in Brooklyn.
He’d had an idea in the night, as a result of our conversation. He wouldn’t tell me what it was as he didn’t want to jinx it, but he promised to give me the full story after he got back.
He was in a jittery, distracted state as we drove to the station, talking in non-sequitur bursts about his Crime-and-Place project, his daughter’s new partner, Hanan’s visa problems, anything but his ‘ordeal’, though it was obvious he’d been up all night thinking about it. He’d shaved, and splashed on some of the cinnamon-scented cologne he sometimes wore, but a sheen of exhaustion clung to him; a sort of manic optimism shot with dread.
‘There’s a quiet car on the train,’ I told him. ‘You should get some sleep.’
‘Not a chance.’
I didn’t hear from him for a while. The spring turned mild and showery, with waves of blossom rolling through the woods, and birdsong bubbling everywhere like some naturally occurring spritz in the air. But it was melancholy too: our first with no child at home. I worked on a book, fitfully; breaking off regularly to remember, as if from yesterday, how I used to sit at this same desk, watching our children laughing and squabbling as they played on the swing set that stood unused now out on the empty lawn. The paradox of memory – being able to traverse in an instant the chasm of time that had taken all these years, all these thousands of days, to inch across in the first place – never ceased to fascinate me, and if I was lucky the fascination would supplant the feeling of sadness. Caitlin, less metaphysically disposed, took it harder – or maybe just took it straight. I’d see her in a doorway, staring at some haunted corner, her eyes moist, a look of bewilderment on her face as if she were trying to recall why she had ever opened herself to this inevitable desolation in the first place. I’d put my arm around her, remind her what happy, functional, unfucked-up kids our parenting, and hers especially, had produced; how they’d always be coming back to us, one way or another … Obvious platitudes, but they seemed to comfort her, at least temporarily, and she’d cheer up, or pretend to; go off to the hospice where she volunteered, or re-pot some plants, or take a stroll with her birding binoculars, or work on a proposal for another travel book in the series we’d started before the kids were born and set aside when they were too old to pull out of school. We were tentative with each other; each of us aware of the need to establish a new basis for our marriage, or re-establish the original basis, if such a thing were possible.
One minor incident occurred, of relevance to this story. The old dairy pasture beyond our lawn was getting overgrown and in danger of reverting to forest. I rented a brush-hog from the hardware store and spent a day of pleasantly mindless labour dragging the squat, all-devouring machine back and forth by tractor across the scrub of brambles and baby pines, leaving satisfying stripes of stubble in my wake. Halfway through the job I saw a turkey hen sitting in some tall weeds. She looked up as I cruised by but she didn’t move, and I realised she must have made her nest there. I steered around her, leaving a small island of brush to keep her hidden. Caitlin was alarmed when I explained the situation. She had a gift for immersing herself in the lives of whatever creatures, human or otherwise, lay closest to hand, and these ungainly birds had joined the ranks of this fondly tended menagerie. She got it into her head that, having drawn the creature here in the first place with our birdseed, we were now responsible for the successful hatching of her eggs. To that end, and with encouragement from an article in one of the many wildlife publications she read, she decided she needed to camp out in the meadow at night for the four-week incubation period, to keep the foxes away.
I don’t sleep well alone. I did try sleeping in the tent with her, but after a couple of uncomfortable nights I resigned myself to a period of solitary slumber, doing my best not to complain. Anyway, it rained fairly often and on those nights, if the rain was hard enough, Caitlin felt it was safe to stay inside. By some miraculous dispensation of the powers that preside over marital harmony, we entered a phase of frequent lovemaking. Our wedding anniversary fell during this time, and we went out to celebrate at our favourite restaurant. It happened to be a dry evening, unseasonably warm, and we had a candlelit dinner on the restaurant’s creek-side terrace. I wasn’t thinking about the turkey as we drove home, and Caitlin s
aid nothing about her. We went to bed, made love and fell asleep in each other’s arms. Early the next morning I heard a cry from the meadow, and ran outside. Caitlin had gone to check on the nest and was standing in front of it, in a state of extreme anguish. The hen was gone, and all her eggs had been broken. It wasn’t Caitlin’s style to blame other people for things that went wrong, and she didn’t say anything directly reproachful to me, but as we stood there looking at the wreckage of the nest with its glistening smashed eggshells spotted with blood, I heard her muttering furiously to herself: ‘I should’ve just done what I wanted to do! I shouldn’t have given in! I always give in!’
I turned and went back into the house, upset and confused. Guilty too, though I had no sense of having forced or even subtly pressured her into sleeping with me. Should I have actively discouraged her, though? Was it my responsibility to think through the situation from her point of view as well as my own? I couldn’t help remembering that comment of hers about people having sex reluctantly, herself included, and of course I couldn’t help thinking about Julia’s accusation against Marco, and wondering if I’d just been accused – albeit within the entirely private precinct of our home – of the same thing, and if so how I should react.
The episode faded fairly quickly and we moved on, but I imagine it affected the way I viewed Marco’s plight, his ‘ordeal’, as it continued evolving over the next several months. I don’t know whether it made me more sympathetic or less. But it certainly made me more interested.
6
He called me after his return from London.
‘Victory!’ he shouted into the phone.
Was I momentarily dismayed? I can’t think why I would have been, but memory persists in noting a split second’s shadow falling before the appropriate response rose to my lips.
‘That’s wonderful, Marco!’
He told me the full story a couple of weeks later when I had a meeting in the city and decided to make a night of it.
I dropped off my things at his house, and we walked to our usual restaurant under the sycamores, the darkness and quiet of the neighbourhood with its ornate old brownstones and occasional modern apartment buildings reminding us both of the London we’d grown up in, though with that wilder atmosphere of even the most genteel New York neighbourhoods; the pervasive sense of more reckless lives being lived under more unpredictable conditions. We’d agreed early on in our friendship that this quality was what gave this city its edge over London, and was one of the reasons why we preferred to live there.
‘My treat this time,’ Marco said as we entered. ‘I’m in the mood for a celebration.’
The place was packed, with a good roar of happy voices blasting out through the door. The maître d’ greeted us warmly and led us to a corner table. Busboys hurried over, eagerly plying us with ice-water and crostini as if we’d crossed deserts to get there and were in urgent need of resuscitation. A waitress, new since we’d last visited, asked if we’d like to hear about the evening’s special cocktails.
‘We’d love to hear about them,’ Marco said with his quick, raffish friendliness. The two had some jokey back-and-forth about the absurd ingredients of some of the drinks and Marco talked me into getting an artisanal gin decoction with pickle brine and smashed strawberries. He ordered two bottles of wine, to be opened right away, whipping out a pair of reading glasses to examine the menu and tucking them back in an inside pocket the instant he was done.
He was evidently his old self again. The Brexit vote had happened while he was in London, and he described how he’d taken advantage of the collapsing pound to go on a spree at Selfridges where he’d picked up some new outfits, including the dandyish rust-coloured cashmere jacket he was wearing. (I don’t mean to portray him as an opportunist, just to convey the unguarded tone we relaxed into when it was only the two of us.)
‘Look …’ He opened the jacket to show me a silk lining patterned with bright fishing lures.
‘Very nice.’
Just then the waitress came back with our cocktails.
‘Is that a Ted Baker?’ she asked.
‘Good guess!’
‘I love Ted Baker.’ She ran her thumb over the fabric with quick, easy familiarity. ‘It’s gorgeous.’
We ordered our food and got straight into the details of his London trip. I’m always interested in the minutiae of such stories and I pushed Marco to remember everything he could. He seemed to enjoy being pushed, even when the details didn’t reflect well on him. Most people use self-deprecation as a clever way to look good, but the stories Marco told against himself seemed genuinely intended to make him look bad, and I had some respect for that.
The idea that had come to him that night in our guest room arose from our conversation earlier in the day. It had to do with Julia’s university boyfriend – the apparent cause of her change of heart in Marco’s bedroom.
‘His name came back to me,’ Marco said. ‘Gerald Woolley.’
‘I know that name. Isn’t he an architectural critic?’
‘He may be now. Yes, I think that was his subject. Don’t tell me he’s become famous …’
‘He’s fairly well known, in that world.’
‘Your dad knew him?’
‘Yeah, but he was banned from our house after praising someone he shouldn’t have. Some postmodernist, no doubt …’
Marco laughed – the embattled lives of the men and women of our parents’ generation, with their lofty principles constantly requiring indignant defence, was a source of amusement to us both.
‘Well, I suddenly remembered he’d written to me.’
‘A letter?’
‘Yes, an actual letter! Remember those? I’d totally forgotten about it till that night at your house. I was lying in bed scrabbling through the past for the zillionth time in search of any scrap of evidence that might help prove my version of events—’
‘I’d been thinking you might try to track down that cameraman.’
‘Oh, I did. He’s dead. He must have been in his forties when I worked with him, so – a drag but not totally surprising. Anyway, the boyfriend’s name popped into my head and for some reason I seemed to be seeing it handwritten in ink on cartridge paper, and I remembered this letter he’d written me. Julia had told him about our affair, and he wanted to meet.’
‘You?’
‘Yes, me.’
‘To fight a duel?’
Marco chuckled, filling our glasses.
‘To discuss the situation, see what sort of person I was, what my intentions were.’
‘That must have been quite a meeting!’
‘It didn’t happen. I don’t think I even answered him. I imagine I dismissed him in my mind as a chump who didn’t merit the effort of a reply from someone as busy and grand and generally superior as myself. No doubt I was further puffed up by the fact that I was shagging his girlfriend. That’s the way I was in those days – very arrogant, very contemptuous. I also took it for granted I was going to be massively famous one day and that biographers were going to be beating a path to my door, so I kept every scrap that had anything to do with my life or career. Every press cutting, every contract; everything short of bus tickets, basically, and probably some of those too. And certainly every letter. I stopped after I moved here, but I’d packed it all up in my parents’ attic when I left London, and no one’s touched it since.’
‘Nice!’ I said.
A busboy cleared our appetisers and the waitress appeared with our main courses – mine was a pasta dish with chorizo and clams in a bright orange sea-urchin sauce.
‘How were your appetisers, gentlemen?’
‘They were extremely rich,’ Marco said.
She looked upset.
‘But we like rich,’ he told her.
‘Oh, good. Me too.’
‘Then we’ll consider allowing you to join our club.’
She gave a laugh with a flirty ripple to it that seemed genuine enough, even allowing for the transactional asp
ect of these exchanges. Marco gazed after her for a moment as she left; not leering, but with an impassive reflexiveness, as if he were unaware of it. There was nothing of the ageing roué about him, except, in some lights, a slight antique colouration in his teeth, which were also crowded and uneven, like mine: little crooked monuments to 1970s English dentistry.
‘So the letter,’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘You found it?’
‘Yes. Here, you can read it.’
He brought up a picture of the letter on his phone. It was written in a neat, legible hand on unlined writing paper, with the date in small roman numerals at the top. I scrolled through it.
Dear Marco (if I may),
I believe you know who I am. I hope you will forgive this intrusion, but I am trying to settle a matter of great importance concerning the future: my own but also that of our mutual friend Julia Gault, and perhaps yourself too. As you know, Julia and I have been together for several years and have been planning to get married after I finish my doctorate. I don’t need to tell you that Julia is enormously attracted to you and has possibly fallen a little in love with you. Obviously this has been painful for me to discover. It is painful to acknowledge too. But I accept that these things happen, and I ask you to believe that my greatest concern here is for Julia’s happiness, not my own. I want only what is best for her, and since she is in a state of some confusion about her own feelings at the moment, I feel I should try to bring some clarity to the situation myself. To that end I would like to ask you to give me an hour or so of your time.
I realise I have no right to question you about your ‘intentions’, and that anyway Julia is free to do as she pleases, regardless of what those intentions may be. But it would be enormously helpful to me to meet you in person, and sound you out on this delicate matter. I assure you I bear you no hostility: quite the reverse. I have long admired your work in television, and I am more than prepared to accept Julia’s high opinion of you, expressed to me in a long and very honest conversation we had yesterday, in which she described you as an exceptional human being: ‘exceptionally decent as well as exceptionally talented’.