Goodness

by Tim Parks

  Would Shirley notice if the sun rose in the west? One wonders. Certainly on this occasion she didn’t appear to appreciate what a massive change of position and principle I had just offered, what a major climb down this was.

  She lit a cigarette. ‘Unless you promise not to go to this other woman again, then you’re going to have to get out of this flat and go and live on your own.’

  ‘Shirley,’ I said, ‘we’re both tired, we’re overwrought. Now let’s just go to bed and sleep on it. I’ve got to go to work in the morning. You’re on holiday. I’m not.’ (School had just broken up.)

  She said the last thing she wanted to do right at the moment was be in the same bed with me.

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  But in the middle of the night she must have slipped in under the covers because I woke up with a start to find her clinging to me. She was naked, which was unusual for her (she usually wears a rather unexciting blue cotton nightdress). Not crying, not saying anything, she twined herself round me. So that when I had fully woken up we made love, violently, with her on top, which again was unusual. And while this was going on I remember thinking with some euphoria, ‘We’re really living now, really living, a modern life, with passion, with intrigue!’

  17 Ollerton Road

  Exactly five days before our scheduled departure for Turkey, Shirley received a letter ‘advising’ her that due to cuts in government grants, etc. etc., her school was being obliged to reduce its staff by two and they thus regretted to inform her that she would be without a job as from the end of the summer break. For myself I couldn’t help feeling that this was rather a blessing in disguise. My first big stroke of luck. Now she would be forced to go for something more stimulating where there were real career opportunities to be had, especially since she wasn’t in a position to apply to most state schools, never having got her teacher training certificate. She could move into something like the media or marketing or business administration or product management. Which should force her to brighten up and most probably get over the baby business.

  But Shirley took it all very badly. On first showing me the letter when I arrived home from work, she was frantic and it was clear that she had been crying for much of the day. I honestly didn’t know what to make of it. Trying without success to comfort her, I said laughingly that for the tough intellectual cookie she had always been, she was crying rather a lot lately, wasn’t she? She went and locked herself in the bathroom. Not for the first time I experienced that acute, that lacerating awareness of having in all probability married the wrong woman.

  The curious thing being that whenever I have this sensation I immediately do my utmost to repress it, I simply won’t accept it, even now, and I get into a veritable frenzy of activity in an attempt to put things right and ‘save the situation’. So now I looked around and started preparing a spaghetti alla carbonara, one of the few decent things I know how to cook, found a bottle of wine at the back of the larder, white, and stuck it in the ice-box, put a tablecloth on the table (took me a while to find where she kept them), sawed through a couple of frozen rolls and stuck them under the grill, etc. I made a feast.

  When she finally emerged, I like to think lured by the smell of sizzling bacon, Shirley was thankful but still apparently inconsolable. It was the only thing that had been going well in her life, she said, her relationship with the children at school. The only thing that hadn’t turned sour. And just to lose it like this . . . Everything, everything was going to pieces.

  I tried to be cheerful, bustling with kitchen implements I wasn’t quite used to. ‘Think of it as a challenge,’ I said. ‘Get yourself a good job.’ But she said that was another thing, she couldn’t get herself a good job now, could she, because if she did she’d never have a child. You couldn’t take a job and then go and get pregnant in the first few months, it wasn’t serious. And she just didn’t want to leave it for a couple of years more.

  I sympathised, though privately I’m thinking, Come on, buck up girl! I mean, if something like this happened to me, I know I’d bounce right back, go for it, don’t let them get you down. Where was her joie de vivre, for heaven’s sake? She was only twenty-eight. And the following day, overtaken by a sudden summer horniness urgent as thirst, and seeing as I hadn’t actually promised anything to anyone just as yet, I left the office early (thinking, after all, we’d be on holiday next week) and went over to Willesden to see Rosemary.

  Who had her period. Mistresses, one feels, shouldn’t have periods. We kissed and sat and talked. She was saying (again!) how amusing my grandfather had been with all his navy stories and little jokes and she kept asking, rather pointedly I thought, about my family and job. When I tried to get away after an hour or so, she protested, she wanted me to stay the night all the same, period or no period, so that I finally had to explain what experience now tells me I should either have got out in the open at the very beginning or just forever and forever denied: that I was married (but that my wife and I didn’t get on and were thinking of divorcing, etc. etc.). Rosemary told me to put on my jacket, pick up my flowers and my bag and get the hell out at once. Just get out. Which, after only a second or so’s lightning quick thinking, I decided to do.

  I drove home and gave the flowers, fortunately still in their wrapping paper, to Shirley, which did have some cheering effect. But it was a day of incredible blunders. For, embracing me to thank me for the flowers, she sniffed the perfume an earlier embrace with Rosemary had left. (Women are so sharp with perfumes, whereas to be honest I can barely tell one from the other, they all smell of sex to me.)

  I confessed at once. As I said, I was determined to be honest if nothing else. This time she didn’t cry but was extremely cool and collected.

  ‘So out you go.’

  She went into the bedroom and started piling my stuff into suitcases. I refused to take any notice and sat down in front of some programme on geriatric care, which again had me wondering whether it wasn’t time to dislodge Grandfather and sell Gorst Road.

  ‘Out,’ Shirley reappeared. ‘Your bags are in the hall.’

  ‘Where to?’ I said.

  ‘Wherever you like.’

  ‘Shirley,’ I said. ‘Come on, we’ve been through all this. Please be reasonable. Anyway, if I go, how are you going to pay the rent, now you haven’t even got a job? Then we’re supposed to be on the ferry Saturday morning at ten.’

  ‘Out.’

  She sat down, leggily cross-legged on the floor and started to stare at me, while I continued to watch the television. She stared and stared, having me feel the full pressure of a gaze I refused to return. Then she had just opened her mouth to speak when the doorbell rang and it was Mark and Sylvia with their usual bottles of beer. And for once they were warmly welcomed, by both of us, as if by prior agreement. Oh hello, old mate, great to see you! Great!’

  For a couple of hours we sparkled, we talked about the old woman downstairs who had taken to moving her furniture about in the middle of the night, the guy in the next block who put a blanket over his Maxi even in summer, about the three hundred Sri Lankans moving in at number five; Shirley rustled up some very attractive cheese and salad snacks on hot rolls; it was all perfectly charming, and even after they left nothing particularly unpleasant was said. Just that the following evening I had barely clattered through the door, before Shirley was barring the passageway announcing she’d found a room for me, in Southgate.

  ‘Out,’ she said. She put two freshly cut Yale keys on the top of the sideboard. ‘17 Ollerton Road. You can find it in the A-Z. The first month’s rent’s paid. Now go.’

  I didn’t think. Without a word, grim-faced, grabbing destiny by the scruff of the neck, and mainly just to show her I didn’t give a damn, I picked up the suitcases, picked up the keys, which had the address and various other bureaucratic jottings attached to them on a luggage tag, and bumped downstairs. At least I got the car this time.

  The room was what you might expect, one of London’s endless mak
eshifts, a grand old Victorian house, now eight separate bedsits. My predecessor, I saw from the bells on the door, had been called Ms Deborah Samberuts. Well. I climbed to the third floor and found a single divan, chest of drawers, wash-basin, wardrobe, etc., all perfectly clean and irretrievably shabby. The pull-down blinds were broken. The walls were grey. A Picasso poster had been mended with Sellotape some long brown time ago and there was the dense smell of aerosol air freshener engaged in unequal combat with years of tobacco smoke stale in a tufty carpet. I looked round, smoked a cigarette myself to sort out the pong, then left my suitcases and went out to find a pub and eat something.

  I think perhaps for three or four hours then I really believed that this was it, that we had separated, that I was going to live in this squalid room for a month or two before finding something more suitable and generally starting a new happier, healthier, or at least less stressful life, preferably as near as possible to the office, Greenford perhaps or Perivale. Rent a flat, fill it with appliances, pick up a really good car on the never never, I quite liked the look of the new Audi 80.

  I closed the door and set out. The evening air had a cool but summery smell walking down to the main road; I interpreted it as a smell of freedom. The pub was full of young people who, from the volume of their conversation, the haze of smoke and maze of glasses around them, obviously shared my belief that life was for friends and fun. At one point there was a flurry of back-slapping and shouts. I sat on my own and watched animated faces, the shifting and posture of bodies, attractive and otherwise, and I must say I took a sort of quiet, determined pleasure, watching these people drink and talk.

  However, towards midnight, alone in Ms Samberuts’s room, when it came to unpacking what Shirley had put in those suitcases, finding toothpaste and pyjamas, a half-full bottle of Milk of Magnesia, my athlete’s foot powder, I don’t know why but I was simply overwhelmed by a great flood of emotion. I bit the pillow and wept. Physically I felt thoroughly sick, with a strain about my throat, tight chest, aching muscles. I beat my fists against the mattress and roared.

  One wonders now about these explosive, these absolutely debilitating emotions: a fully-grown man lying in a shabby suburban room moaning. One wonders if somehow they mightn’t have been controlled, tranquillised, fended off. For looking back, here was an escape route I would have done well to have taken. For Shirley’s sake too. For everybody’s. The irony being that I often wonder if these tumultuous feelings of regret, of sentiment, gusting through me like storm winds the way they do, aren’t perhaps after all the best part of George Crawley, the nearest he comes to love. And equally frequently I will catch myself wondering if Hilary isn’t my destiny somehow, if my present dilemma, which arose out of that crisis, isn’t precisely the decision I was born to make.

  I don’t know. The superstitious mentality dies hard of course. In any event, I wept on the bed in this rented room, tried to sleep, couldn’t, then did, and promptly had one of the truly atrocious nightmares I would later have to learn to get used to.

  Mutilation is my forte with nightmares. It begins as a suffocating sense of horror, concentrated about clenched jaw and tight Adam’s apple. Then all at once I’ll be aware that, for example, my hand is missing. There is just the wrist dripping blood, perhaps the bone protruding, ragged flesh. Following which we plunge into hectic, gorily visual oneiric narrative as I feverishly wrap the stump in a blanket, in toilet paper, and start searching for the lost hand, wondering if it can’t perhaps be saved, re-attached, my mind actually flicking at tremendous speed through all the sensational stuff one reads in papers about surgeons working all night to put some child’s arm back on – always a child’s. And in my dream, strangely, I am both a child and an adult, as if I had lost this hand years ago, yet the wound is still bloody and fresh.

  I search. Gorst Road. Always Gorst Road. Sometimes it’s my hand I’m after, sometimes my foot or leg, sometimes my dick, or even my head. Like some horrible ghost, I hunt through room after room, turning over settee cushions, opening drawers, the way in waking life I frequently look for keys I’ve mislaid, pens, papers, tickets. But the missing part is never found, just as the accident that caused it is never explained. And perhaps as I search I don’t really want to find it, thinking how gory it will be when I do, remembering a book I read once where somebody digs his murdered child’s head from a shallow grave, the eyes full of mud. Or on other occasions the search will turn up not the missing part of me at all, but Grandfather, gross and bloated in his armchair, or Aunt Mavis of all people, on her back, nightdress pulled up over a thick white belly, face hideously giggling in death.

  Such is my average nightmare, the kind of neurosis-generated angst fantasy that merely confirms one’s contemporaryness, I suppose – busy man, under pressure – the kind of thing you can even learn to look on with a certain affection after the nth recurrence.

  But the night Shirley threw me out was the first time. And the interpretation seemed obvious. I was mutilated by this break-up. Indeed in my sleep I started calling out for her, needing to show her the disaster, the bloody stump, and so finally, shouting my wife’s name, I woke myself up. I was in a sweat, shocked and full of adrenalin. Immediately, in just pyjamas, relieved as I moved that I hadn’t stopped to agonise over this one, I ran down two flights of gritty, lino-covered stairs to a pay phone on the first landing. Then back to my room for a coin, then back to the phone.

  I wept as I spoke. She wept on hearing me weeping. We told each other we couldn’t bear the thought of separation. We had invested so much in our marriage, our identities were so wrapped up in it, in each other, we just couldn’t bear for it to end. Who were we if not our marriage? In half an hour I was home and enjoying precisely the sentimental reconciliation I had hoped for and been denied just days before.

  So that only a few weeks later, shortly after our return from Turkey, it would be the rings in her urine in the middle of the night, followed by the serious talk with Mr Harcourt, the mortgage, the payrise, the house in Hendon with permission for an extension, nausea, pregnancy books, pre-natal classes and a host of purchases to be made . . .

  Such was the power of love. And now it actually came to it, I didn’t mind. I thought, you can handle this, George. You can be happy with this. This is the way life goes. It’s manageable. For Shirley was in such delightful mood now. She was so bright and pleasant, so much my old Shirley. And I thought, you should have caved in on this one ages back, George. This isn’t going to do you any harm. When we lay in bed one night going through the Penguin book of names, I said: ‘If it’s a girl let’s call her Hilary.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it means cheerful, apparently. Like us.’

  Part Two

  HILARY

  How Things Happen . . .

  There is a taboo about handicapped children of course. I’ve had time and occasion to think about this. Either they are wept over by social-consciousness mongers who want to show the government’s not spending enough, or they are simply not mentioned at all. Except perhaps in jokes of the worst taste. Their parents are generally perceived as angels who love them against all the odds, or devils who abuse and abandon them. Martyrdom and brutality make good copy. Another focus of occasional interest are the ones who overcome horrendous difficulties to paint Christmas cards with a brush gripped between the second and third toes. Maybe the TV’ll show you about thirty seconds of their sad and twisted bodies (not that I’m saying they should show more). Then there are the tabloid fables of what genetic engineering may be able to do in the future, and of course the emotive question of whether the severely mentally handicapped girl should be sterilised regardless of consent, that’s an interesting old chestnut. But the day to day business of working, nursing and cleaning, while all the time facing that enormous sense of loss, of no hope, of no way out . . . forget it. I certainly would if I could.

  I was kissing Shirley’s wet cheeks, she was squeezing my hand hard, sobbing for joy. The child was born. Our
child. It was a girl. And so Hilary. We felt extraordinarily whole, fulfilled as a couple, we really did. I was truly happy. When the young doctor, examining the child on a white cloth, says in the kind of regional accent one has come to associate with sit-com and soap opera: ‘It’s a right mess this one I’m afraid. Never seen anything like it.’ Doctors, I’ve discovered, have quite a way with the handicapped.

  How things happen and one is tricked into getting used to them! My mother, bringing flowers and baby clothes, says she’s sure it’s nothing they can’t put right. They can do such amazing things these days and we must all pray. Deliberately, I sense, she keeps calling the child by her name, as if she were already a person, picking her up, kissing her, celebrating, as if everything were perfectly normal. Immediately I’m aware of an undercurrent of pious persuasion, to accept this child on any terms as one of the flock, which immediately, instinctively I resist. Then resist the resistance. She is my child. So that I too say, ‘Darling little Hilary,’ while my mother kisses and fondles her.

  But Shirley is listless. She keeps her baby completely swaddled and leaves it to the nurses to change her. She doesn’t seem to want to touch or look at her. She doesn’t want to talk about the problem, nor to hear all the rumours of syndromes, cures and prospects that I am rapidly gleaning. I sense that in her silence she is simply willing for it not to be true. She is waiting to wake up into a different reality. Breastfeeding, she weeps quietly, smoothing the child’s thin damp hair. The little face is strange, and strangely endearing.

  Mrs Harcourt arrives at last. She bustles brightly but keeps her camera in her case. She doesn’t ask to see the girl’s body. Mr Harcourt comes, phoning first to make sure he won’t find Mrs Harcourt. He is grave and distant. There have been, he says, no cases, to his knowledge, of handicap in the Harcourt family. In the corridor he tells me confidentially that any way he can help financially not to hesitate to ask, and he claps me on a shoulder and says if anybody is equipped to deal with a problem like this it is me. I am so straightforward and sensible. I have my head so firmly on my shoulders.