I Could Love You

by William Nicholson

  What is it that his clients want? Deliverance from shame? The restoration of normality? But he knows there is no normality. So many examinations over the years, so many women standing, trembling, exposed, naked in his office: he more than anyone knows the commonplace oddity of the human body. If only they could see what he sees, the shame would evaporate. But instead they see this fantasy called beauty: a fantasy because no single individual believes they have it, but all believe others have it. Beauty is a state that is always just out of reach. Or you could say there’s no such thing as beauty. We define it so variously that it doesn’t exist. What does exist, what remains constant, is our feelings about beauty: what we seek is a certain feeling about ourselves which is stimulated by the perceptions of others. The entire process actually happens in the mind, in our own minds and in the minds of the people round us. Beauty turns out to be a group delusion. So much is obvious. The plastic surgeon operates on the minds of his patients. So why stop there? What else is illusion? My value as an individual? The meaning of my existence?

  The consultation proceeds. The surgeon understands that his client has already made up her mind. After all, it takes courage to come into the office of a stranger and speak openly of your body and its limitations, let alone show that body. She will have scoured the Internet, studied brochures, talked to friends. Now she is fired up and ready to go. Nevertheless, he must take her through the risks: infection, allergic reaction, pulmonary embolism, everything up to and including death.

  ‘But they’re rare, aren’t they?’ she says. ‘I mean, I’m more at risk driving my car, right?’

  She laughs and touches her husband’s knee, to reassure him.

  ‘That’s true,’ says the surgeon. ‘But it’s important that you’re fully informed.’

  He hears the nervousness in her laugh, and feels as always a wave of protective tenderness. Beneath the make-up, behind the quick bobbing glances at her husband, there lies such bravery. All these women were once girls in school, dreading the weekly swimming lesson where they would have to expose their awkward bodies to the cold blue light.

  ‘Now,’ he says, ‘I think the next step is the examination.’

  Mr Lazarus stands up.

  ‘You’re very welcome to stay, Mr Lazarus. It’s entirely as you and Mrs Lazarus wish.’

  Mr Lazarus looks to his wife.

  ‘Stay, darling,’ says Mrs Lazarus. ‘It’s not like you’re going to get any surprises.’

  Her husband sits down again.

  ‘He’s the one gets the surprises,’ she says, nodding at Tom Redknapp.

  The surgeon smiles.

  ‘Not any more,’ he says. ‘In my business you get to see what people really look like, thank God, not the touched-up fake version.’

  ‘So hey-ho,’ says Mrs Lazarus, her voice bright. ‘I suppose this is where I take my top off.’

  When he first saw Meg naked she covered her breasts with her hands, out of shame.

  ‘Don’t you wish they were bigger?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t want any part of you different to the way you are,’ Tom replied.

  Does that make me a better man than Mr Lazarus? Not at all. We both act in obedience to our desires.

  Here lies the terrible possibility: that my existence only becomes meaningful in the short highly-charged interval be tween the birth of a desire and its satisfaction. That this is what the struggle of my days is directed towards. That this is all there is.

  After the consultation he catches up on his paperwork. Then he calls Meg’s office and learns she’s out for the rest of the day. He tries her mobile and reaches her in her car.

  ‘I was thinking of looking in about six-thirty. If you’re going to be in.’

  ‘Of course I’ll be in.’

  ‘I’ll only have half an hour or so.’

  ‘All right. See you then.’

  He attends a management meeting of the hospital board. The planned extension from twenty-five to fifty beds is proceeding on schedule, with the new floor expected to be ready by February. However, bookings are down.

  ‘December’s always a slow month,’ says Vernon, the finance manager. ‘But we have to assume current financial conditions will affect business going forward. We may not experience the usual mid-January pick-up.’

  Tom Redknapp plays very little part in the discussion. His mind is on the mystery of desire.

  I desire because I am desired.

  A man can have a fine opinion of himself bred in him by a loving family and all the privileges of his class; he can go to a fine university and build an enviable career; he can do all these things and never for one moment believe himself to be desirable.

  We’re talking about sex, of course. But does that make it any less significant? There’s nothing shallow about sex, nothing superficial. Marriage, if you like, you can call that superficial: a social arrangement, a bargain struck at a certain moment in time. But sexual desire goes to the very core.

  Looking back over his life he realizes that he has always believed in his own desire but never in theirs. Not the desire of the women. He always suspected in them, more than suspected, assumed in them an ulterior motive. The man wants sex and baits it with the chance of commitment. The woman wants commitment and baits it with the chance of sex. So far, so obvious. Except that there are casualties here that lie unremarked on the field of combat: the death of female desire; the loss of men as sexually desirable beings.

  We collude. I collude. So frantic in my twenties in the pursuit of sex by any means I fed the hope of something more. Why else would she oblige me? Then the parting, the accusation of betrayal, the guilt. You lied to me! You didn’t love me! After a while the act of lying itself comes to be sexually charged, or at least the intensity of the sexual excitement seems to be contingent on the level of the moral transgression. We collude in the lie that sex is an early way station on the road to love. Even our bodies collude in the lie, because always after the sex comes the revulsion, the sense of worthlessness, the self-accusation: was it for that that I lied?

  No, not for that. Not for the short shudder of bliss. For the gathering storm that preceded it, for the rolling thunder that begins low and far away and comes ever closer until it fills the sky and drowns the world. For desire.

  ‘You’re very quiet, Tom,’ says Vernon.

  ‘Why aren’t we talking about low-season discounts?’ says Richard Graves.

  ‘We can’t advertise discounts,’ says Vernon. ‘That’s an inducement, and inducements are illegal.’

  ‘Bloody stupid if you ask me,’ says Richard Graves. ‘So how are we going to pay the bills when we’ve doubled in size and halved our bookings?’

  ‘Maybe,’ says Tom, who hasn’t been listening and so says what they’ve all been thinking, ‘maybe we shouldn’t go ahead with the expansion.’

  ‘But we’ve built it!’

  ‘So? We don’t have to equip it, staff it, heat it.’

  ‘That is a legitimate option,’ says Vernon cautiously, looking round the table.

  ‘So what do we do with it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Put it to sleep. Wait for better times.’

  This precipitates an explosion of disagreement. Tom withdraws once more into his own thoughts. He’s indifferent to the outcome one way or the other. What’s the worst that can happen? The hospital goes bust. He’s a shareholder, he loses his stake. So what? He has a marketable skill. Life goes on.

  So I have no ambition any more?

  In some strange way he feels as if he’s started his life over again. This time round there’s no drive to achieve, no deferring of pleasure in the interests of later gain. This time, the pleasure.

  Yes, she said. Of course I’ll be in.

  The other day she asked for a picture of him when he was young. He showed her the photograph his friend Olly took of him dancing at his twenty-first. He’s always liked it because he looks happy though in fact he wasn’t.

  ‘Oh, you’re so gorgeous!�
� Meg said when she saw it.

  Looking through her eyes he saw a sweet-faced boy with shaggy hair, a lithe body. It was as if he was looking at a stranger. His own memory is of physical awkwardness, sticky-out ears, narrow chest, freckles, eyes that plead and look away. The musty odour of desperation.

  Now, of course, thirty years later, three stone heavier, balding, cheeks sagging, eyes bagging, he can no longer be called gorgeous. But it’s now that he’s desired.

  The meeting comes to a conclusion. The hospital expansion will proceed. A new marketing drive will aim to lift patient numbers. Vernon undertakes to brief the marketing team and Pegasus, the retained PR company.

  As they leave Richard Graves murmurs to Tom, ‘I should have thought you’d have more to say, with your new-found interest in marketing.’

  Meg is in marketing.

  ‘I leave that to you youngsters,’ says Tom. Richard Graves is at most ten years his junior. ‘In my day only the charlatans advertised.’

  ‘Oh, the charlatans are advertising, all right,’ says Richard. ‘Any quack can offer cosmetic surgery these days. That’s why we have to get out there, make our case, save the suckers from their own stupidity.’

  Tom has now been made aware that his attentions to Meg have not gone unnoticed. What do you expect in a place this size? A staff of a hundred and twenty or so, everyone knows everything. They’ll be joking about it, maybe expressing surprise, Meg isn’t an obvious candidate for seduction in her sober business suit and her sober business face. Not exactly a beauty, they’ll be saying. Nothing to write home about. And there’s the wonder of it. Beauty turns out not to create desire after all. Desire creates beauty.

  These things take you by surprise. He has almost no memory of Meg in the first weeks after her arrival. Once she stopped him on the corridor to tell him that she needed case histories to feed to journalists, how rhinoplasty saved my life and so forth. But he paid her no attention until the BAAPS conference in London.

  They found themselves in a lift together, in the Waldorf Hilton. It was the end of the last session, they were both tired. He noticed that her hands were shaking. They made polite conversation. Then she closed her eyes. No more than the kind of thing you do if your eyes are hurting at the end of the day. She was telling him how much she was learning, her lips moving, her eyes closed, and he studied her face, and there were her hands, shaking. Then she opened her eyes and met his gaze without her defences in place, and he saw it as naked as a kiss: she desires me.

  The lift doors opened. They went their separate ways. But from that moment on he looked at her differently. She changed under his eyes. She became beautiful.

  So in a little while, in about an hour and a quarter, he’ll pull in to one of the parking spaces reserved for residents of the Victorian mansion called Ridgewood Grange. There, in a two-bedroom flat with views of the communally-maintained park, Meg will be waiting.

  8

  Chloe has to run, dragging her wheeled suitcase with the worn wheels that bang like a machine-gun, and only just gets onto the train before the doors close for departure. She left masses of time to get from Paddington to Victoria but of course no Circle line train came for ever. Now she feels hot and cross and the train is full.

  She jerks her suitcase down the aisle through four carriages to get into the half that will go on to Lewes after the train divides at Haywards Heath. The only empty seat is a foursome occupied by a fat young mother and two fat young children. The children are sprawled on the seats in such a way that there’s no room for a fourth.

  Chloe stands her suitcase in the aisle beside them and says as sweetly as she can, ‘Any chance of a seat?’

  ‘Move, Wayne,’ says the mother. ‘Out of the way, Jordan.’

  The children don’t move.

  Chloe waits, smiling, wanting to smack their fat bored faces. Their mother goes red, raises one hand, and screams.

  ‘Move or I belt you one!’

  The children move, slowly, sulkily. Chloe sits down. The small fat boy starts to whine.

  ‘Mu-um. I’m hungry.’

  ‘No you’re not. You had chips.’

  ‘But I’m hungry.’

  ‘Me too,’ says the girl. ‘I’m hungry.’

  ‘Not now,’ says their mother. ‘Later.’

  ‘But I’m hungry,’ says the boy. ‘My tummy hurts.’

  ‘And mine,’ says the girl. ‘My tummy hurts.’

  ‘Will you be quiet!’ shrieks the mother. ‘I said no!’

  Both children begin to cry. ‘Jesus God!’ says the mother.

  She stares at the children as if she hates them. Undeterred they maintain their steady snivelling. Chloe hates them too. She puts her iPod earpieces into her ears but she can hear the children crying over the beat of the music. People on trains complain when iPods have their volume turned up too high. How about children with their volume turned up too high?

  Outside the train window darkness has fallen, and it’s not yet half past four. Short days, long nights. Chloe hates winter. She sees herself reflected in the carriage window, and unthinkingly adjusts her lips to a slight pout, a moue her mother calls it, and passes a hand through her blonde hair. She’s wearing her hair partly pinned at the back to make it fluff out on top, the bed-head look. She’s an extremely pretty girl, in a style that’s no longer fashionable, pink cheeks and blue eyes, petite and curvy, reassuringly feminine. Not looking her best right now, she needs at least forty-eight hours sleep, the end of term has been murder. To her expert eye her skin lacks lustre, her hair is drooping. Also she’s just started her period. She wants to be home where she can shut herself in her room and have no one bother her.

  The fat mother cracks. She pulls out a bag of Celebrations and lays it on the table between the fat children. The children stop whining and fall to an absorbed concentration of the choice before them. Mini-Mars Bars, mini-Snickers, mini-Bounties, mini-Milky Ways. Then they begin to eat. Steadily, crackling the wrappers, they suck and chew their way through Celebration after Celebration. The fat mother produces a bag of smoky bacon crinkle-cut crisps for herself. Chloe is no stranger to junk food herself, but this is a horror show. This mother is murdering her children.

  Her phone pings. A text from Hal.

  Sorry sorry sorry

  Now he’s sorry. What happened to ‘You fucking slut I hope you die’? It’s not as if she didn’t tell him. It’s not as if she didn’t feel bad. He’s the one chose to turn it into the biggest betrayal in history. Everyone cheats from time to time, boys most of all. What matters is what you do afterwards. So she had a fling with Robbie, these things happen, it didn’t mean anything, and she told Hal right away. He was cool about it, she cried as she was telling him, he held her in his arms, he said, ‘Hey, no big deal.’ And then that same evening, that very same evening, he goes crazy. Talk about Jekyll and Hyde. You fucking slut, you make me sick, I hope you die, and all the rest.

  Robbie is a bit of a twat to be honest, one tab of E and he thinks he can fuck for England. ‘You want more? You want more?’ No more, thank you, Robbie. If I start moaning now will you get the fuck on with it and come so I can get some sleep? Oh-Oh-Oh! No one’s made me come like that before! You’re the one! Whoop-de-doo.

  Now Robbie’s following me round like a sodding puppy. What is it with boys? You go for them because they’re mean and dangerous and next thing they’re all over you like a wet duvet. The fun all happens at the beginning, when they’re not sure if they want you, and you say to yourself, I’m going to make that boy crazy about me. But then it happens and you’re screwed. Like every way. Who wants a boyfriend for life when you’re nineteen? Can’t I just have one for Christmas? That way I can throw him away on Boxing Day when I’m bored with him.

  Chloe giggles to herself. I’m such a cow. But why not? Why does everyone get so stressy like I’ve married them or something? It wasn’t my idea to break up with Hal. I didn’t have to tell him about Robbie. It’s not like I did it to hurt him. What differen
ce does it make anyway? Seriously. I’m not Hal’s wife. He doesn’t own me. It’s not like Robbie’s stolen something from him. It’s only sex, for fuck’s sake.

  So he dumped me and now he’s sorry and what am I supposed to do?

  She texts back: Me too. Call later.

  Hal’s sweet really. She remembers how crazy she was about him in the first week of term, with his long curly hair and his bobble hat and his acoustic guitar. Back then she felt almost shy with him because she had rich parents and had been to private school and he was out of this ultra-hard estate in Cardiff. She was soft and southern and blue-eyed and blonde and he was dark and wild. He laughed at her accent and called her Babe and pretended she was too delicate to go out in the rain, and she said, ‘Yeah, right, I’m delicate,’ and put her hand down his jeans. That was a good time.

  The refreshments trolley approaches, rattling and clinking its cargo of drinks. The fat children look up, their lips and fingers smeared with chocolate, and set up a new whine.

  ‘Want a Coke, Mum!’

  ‘Thirsty, Mum!’

  ‘You want me to belt you one?’ offers the fat mother.

  ‘But Mu-u-um!’

  ‘I’m warning you, Wayne!’

  ‘But I’m thirsty!’

  So she gets them both Cokes, and they drink eagerly, sucking on their straws with long pulls. Then they return to the Celebrations.

  The train is coming in to East Croydon. People are getting up, leaving their seats. Chloe gets up too. She drags her suitcase through to the next carriage, pushing her way past the people who are preparing to get off.

  There she finds an empty window seat with just one other person on the other side, and she’s sat down and pulled her suitcase in beside her before she realizes it’s someone she knows.

  ‘Alice?’

  ‘Chloe?’

  It’s Alice Dickinson. She’s hardly seen her since they were at prep school together over five years ago. Now she’s all tall and thin, her face a little too long for her features, and more interesting than she used to be. Chloe runs a rapid check and decides it’s the eyes. There’s something appealing about those big brown eyes.