‘Unwilling to really truly absolutely say something.’
‘Really truly absolutely?’
‘I know I sound like a five-year-old; anyone who speaks with any emphasis these days does.’
‘I admire your energy,’ said Jacob, taking her arm.
‘You think I’m a child.’
He didn’t deny it.
They walked on in silence, which made her nervous so she tried again. ‘I’m sure your book’s not particularly dull but the title does put me off. Yet another so-and-so’s something-or-other.’
‘It refers to the pendulum.’
‘What have pendulums got to do with eggs?’
‘Foucault’s pendulum stays in the arc of its swing while the world moves round it.’
‘I know that.’
‘I’m sure you do. However, if other forces exert pressure, they disturb the pendulum’s swing and instead of tracing an arc, its path becomes elliptical, ovoid, like an egg.’
‘I understand the concept, but what does it mean?’
‘It doesn’t mean anything. It’s a record of process, a map of accumulating disturbance.’
‘And what’s it got to do with the city?’
‘How we move and think and meet – everything, really.’
He gave something of a laugh and letting go of Juliet, turned into Green Park where the sky was the green-black-blue of medieval pigment, so rich and strange that some of those who looked up at it wished that everything else, including the stars and even themselves, would disappear.
Jacob was enjoying the silence between them, but Juliet was caught up. ‘Do people buy that? God, I bet they do. We love patterns, even anti-patterns, as long as they’re graceful.’
‘What’s an anti-pattern?’
‘Fuck knows, I just made it up. And what is your egg? No, don’t answer that. I bet I could carry on asking you questions all night and you would always have an answer, and every answer would take us further away.’
‘From what?’
‘The point. And if you say “Does there have to be one?”, I just might puke.’
Jacob looked a little shocked. ‘So no more questions?’
‘No.’
‘Tania told me you’ve almost finished your thesis.’
‘She talked to you about me?’
‘No more questions – although I would like to know more if you want to tell me.’
He took her arm again and they walked on to the end of the park while Juliet explained her theory of the empty metaphor and the frame. By the time they had reached Hyde Park Corner, she was exhilarated because no one had ever been so interested or had understood it so well.
He had surprised her and now she surprised herself by saying, ‘You’re quite patient, really.’
‘Yes, I am.’
They were walking unnaturally slowly and for a long moment, nothing was said.
‘I’m going away,’ Juliet announced in the tone of someone remarking that they had lost a glove. ‘In six months time, to America.’ Jacob did not react. She went on: ‘A visiting professor at the Institute, Merle Dix …’ Did he recognise the name? She wasn’t sure. ‘She’s going back to Littlefield and has offered me a research post.’ Still nothing. ‘At the end of August, for a year.’
A bus pulled up as they reached the stop. Juliet stepped forward, then turned back to face Jacob and found herself turning in his arms. To stop herself meeting his kiss, she said the first thing that came to mind: ‘My father was a medical student in London in the Fifties and he used to talk of a walk that took in every bridge.’
He lifted his hands, spread his fingers and pressed them to either side of her face. ‘Have you done it?’
‘No.’
‘How long have you lived here?’
‘Ten years, nearly.’
‘Let’s do it then.’
He tipped her head to one side. She felt his teeth electrically sharp on her earlobe, and then her head was tilted forward and his whole open mouth was on the back of her neck.
She stepped back, meaning to say ‘You’re married’, but what she said was ‘I’m going away’.
A bell rang, an engine revved and the conductor gave a torn-off shout. Then Juliet was leaning her head against a window watching her jittery reflection, and Jacob had gone.
On the steps of a City banqueting hall, Fred held Jane’s hand. Her head lolled on his shoulder as she hiccupped and gurgled. He tried not to look down at her breasts which were shying away from the bodice of her strapless dress. He drew her fun-fur coat more tightly together at her neck. She flinched and Fred trembled.
‘Grem,’ Jane mumbled. Then more urgently, ‘Grem? Grem!’
‘Graham’s gone to find a cab. Caroline’s helping him.’
‘Going home are now? Um, we?’ She was shivering, so Fred took off his rented dinner jacket and put it round her shoulders, giving her dress a restorative tug as he did so.
From the hall above them came a continuous baying, as if everyone in the room had worn out their voice and could now only make noise. Five hundred young financiers were trying to live up to the stories they had heard. Their bosses sat at the top table – men in their thirties and forties, veterans of the economy’s most volatile years. They were bored with the games and pranks but clever enough to encourage the belief that if money was a tool, it was also a toy.
A group were competing over the most amusing thing to do with the chocolate mousse. A man wiped it across the bottom of a passing waiter, raising a cry of ‘Shit-arsed dago!’ but the one who provoked the greatest cheer pulled a fifty-pound note from his wallet and used it as a spoon. This caught on as if no one had done it before, and those who had only tens or twenties used several at once. A window opened and a hand threw a spike-heeled sandal into the night. Fred retrieved it and noticed the price label on the sole, £449. He passed it to Jane, ‘Look at this.’
‘Gord!’ she blurted, ‘Y fnd m shoe!’
He looked down. ‘You’re wearing your shoes.’
‘Wanted these shoe. Thuz a waitin list.’
To Fred, the one in her hand looked identical to the pair on her feet.
‘This is somebody else’s, and anyway there’s only one.’
Jane clutched the shoe to her. ‘Sbetter thn nn.’
‘Someone will be looking for it.’
Jane held the shoe more tightly.
Feet were pounding the floor and a chant had gone up: ‘Off! Off! Off!’ but at that moment someone at the top table gave a sign and the lights flicked on, and all the young men in the room straightened themselves out as best they could and began trying to help the nearest woman out of her seat. They trailed out with elaborate courtesy, shaking hands, helping each other into coats, holding open doors and volunteering (like Graham and Caroline) to find cabs. Some would go home and wonder at themselves but being young and excitable and rich, as well as so very tired, none would let this bewilderment harden into anguish. They would sleep and if they couldn’t, they had no qualms about pursuing sleep through whatever means they chose.
‘Cold a long long while,’ Juliet was singing to herself on the almost empty bus as Mary George got out of the saxophone-player’s mini-van and climbed five flights of stairs in Block A, North Square of the Hugh Carmodie Trust Estate in Walham Green. Mary had moved there five years ago and was used to its treeless concrete squares. She knew by name the twelve-year-olds who rose out of dark corners to sell bags of powder. She knew the wandering encrusted toddlers, the coddled pitbull terriers, the girls who smoked and shrieked beneath her window, and the boys who careered past in stolen cars refining their handbrake turns. She was on first-name terms with the women who kept their flats spotless and swore at their children, who were brought up in the old-fashioned way. They were free to play outside all day, given duties from an early age and retained respect for their parents. Many of them had aunts, uncles and grandparents living nearby.
Mary let herself into the dark hall, stubbed her toe on
a piece of motorbike engine and then bumped into a clothes-horse draped with washing and positioned just inside the living-room door. In the bedroom, she took off her clothes and put on a t-shirt that Tobias had left on top of the laundry bin. She lay down and reached out, her hand meeting first his cropped hair, then the coarse stubble on his cheek and then, beside him, the heat and force of their two-year-old daughter, Bella George Clough.
Mary propped herself up and put her lips against Bella’s head to kiss her, catching the odd smell of biscuit and vinegar that collected in the child’s clammy hair. Bella began to wake, her mouth opening and closing with a sticky smack. Her free arm waved and her legs kicked out as if the world had all at once let go of her. Her fists clenched and her first sleepy agitations hardened into a wail, and Mary wondered as she often did if Bella sometimes forgot having been born and was furious to find herself here.
Tobias began to sit up. Mary lifted Bella onto her chest and pushed him back down. He smiled, mumbling Hello, Good night and How did it go, trying to find her to kiss her. Mary kept her hand on his shoulder, saying ‘Goodnight, fine, sleep now,’ as he subsided back under the quilt. He was working as a despatch rider and had to set off at seven-thirty. Mary settled herself back against the pillows, feeling the child’s fist knock against her ribs as she sang to her:
Somewhere over dawn’s early light,
it begins, the holding hands,
haunting me to tell,
a long long while outside.
Soon Bella was sleeping again and Mary continued to sit, one hand caught in Tobias’s sleeve and the other pressed against the solid back of her daughter. She started to drift off but even this sketchy darkness brought the rushing feeling back, and as her eyes closed her hand shot up and she shouted ‘Stop!’
Tobias turned towards her.
‘Sorry, did I wake you?’ Mary asked, putting her hand on his shoulder. Stop.
He opened his eyes. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘I don’t know why I said it, I’m sorry.’
‘Said what?’
‘Stop. I shouted “Stop”.’
‘It was just a dream. You didn’t shout anything. I would’ve heard you.’
Even if the post had not been lying on his camp bed, Jacob would have known that it was Barbara who had broken in. He would say nothing to her. The spilled papers and books were worthless to him now. He would leave them where she had dropped them until the day he gave up the room, and began now by walking over them to collect a notepad, a bottle of whiskey and a packet of Egyptian cigarettes. He wrapped the Mexican blanket from his bed around his shoulders and sat on the step where he smoked and drank, the calm this brought balanced by the stimulus of the cold air. He made notes in writing he would not be able to read, looking up now and then to watch the light enlarging above the river.
Jacob had the air of someone halfway through a door. People thought of him as averted and non-committal and, being Jacob, he enjoyed such misunderstandings. He wondered at the evening, and admired his own insistence. This girl who looked like a boy was still young enough for her gaucheness to be endearing. She had begun to know things about which he knew more. She was more susceptible than she realised and she was in pain, he could see that. She was going away. Jacob knew exactly why Juliet interested him and this did nothing to alter his belief that he was in love.
Juliet sat up in bed. ‘Endearingly emphatic! Endearing! Christ. And emphatic. Emphatic! Fuck, fuck. Endearingly emphatic! Fuck …’
FIVE
Once Juliet decided that she ought to see a doctor, she began to organise her illness. She made a list. How long had she been having pain? She could not remember when it began, nor could she imagine being free of it, and because it had once been tolerable, she had assumed it still was. It had not occurred to her to worry about the fact that she had to sit down and lift her feet into the air to put on her shoes, or that sometimes she could not breathe well or find words. These things were simply there to be negotiated.
The doctor was a shockingly handsome man of about her age and she was so determined not to be embarrassed, she was a doctor’s daughter after all, that when he asked her to undress, she stood up immediately and pulled off her skirt. ‘No!’ cried the doctor. ‘I’ll just fetch a … someone … Please! Go behind the screen and remove your clothes, just your lower half, and lie down. And cover yourself, please, with the blanket.’
He returned with a nurse, who stood by Juliet’s head while the handsome young man asked her to raise her knees and then touched her thigh, meaning to move her leg to one side, only he did so too slowly, too gently, and Juliet blushed and turned her face towards the wall. She felt a chill blob of lubricating jelly and then the doctor started to issue warnings – that this might feel cold or sharp or uncomfortable – and Juliet felt pressure as the speculum was inserted and then opened with that scraping noise that was only the turn of a screw, but which nonetheless frightened her more than the pain caused by his fingers probing parts of her that felt too deep to belong. She had tears running down her face but the only sounds she made were when the doctor asked if this hurt, or this, or this. He was picking over the pieces of glass and stone she had come to imagine were inside her, and he knew exactly where to find them.
Eventually, the doctor peeled off his gloves, washed his hands, went back to his desk and began to type with unexpected efficiency as the nurse handed Juliet some tissue, with which she wiped her eyes. The nurse handed her some more. The doctor typed for a long time.
He asked more questions and Juliet told him in explicit detail about the colour and texture and quantity of the blood, and also about the pain: ‘Sometimes it makes me throw up; other times I shit brown water.’
He rubbed his hands together, realised what he was doing and stopped. ‘I’m going to refer you.’
‘What will they do?’
‘Probably a scan and then, if need be, they’ll take you in and have a look round.’
‘Look round for what?’
‘Anything a scan might not pick up. They’ll probably go in through the belly button so you won’t have to worry about a scar.’
‘When will this be done?’
‘The current waiting time is five to six months.’
‘But I’m going away.’
‘You’re, what, twenty-eight? You’ve got plenty of time. Reschedule if you have to. Meanwhile, I’ll give you something for the pain.’ He had stroked this woman’s thigh. He wanted her out of his surgery as quickly as possible.
When Juliet arrived at the gallery that afternoon, there was a note from Tania asking her to pick up some contracts from an insurance company whose offices were near Chancery Lane, in that uncertain area where banks and newspapers hovered close to what had for centuries been their home. There were many parts of London that Juliet did not know and this was one of them. She had found her routes, her places and her perspectives, and it was not in her nature to wander. She hated getting lost and was cross to find that she had, emerging from the Tube station confused by a choice of exits. Still phased by the handsome doctor’s touch and the residual pain from his examination, she followed other pedestrians as they made their way between traffic cones and scaffolding, realised she was heading in the wrong direction, turned a corner and found herself at the back of Smithfields meat market, which had already closed for the day. The tall doors looked as if they hadn’t been opened for years but splashes and clots, theatrically scarlet, persisted in the sluiced gutters and among the cobbles. She could not see a way past the market, nor was it going to let her in, so she turned back to the station.
As Juliet approached the company’s offices at last, she was thrown to the ground. She had heard a profound boom and a large hand, an enormous hand, had pushed her. She lifted her head and looked back. There was no one, nothing behind her, but she had felt the force of something heavy and close, as if a building had collapsed at her shoulder or a skip full of earth had been dropped at her heels. She pulled herself up
onto her feet with the sensation of having to peel an electrified swarm of something off the ground and pull it into shape. It was as if this sound, which travelled so unnaturally through her body, had separated every cell.
Around her, the noise of the city was changing. The dragging tension of grid-locked traffic broke up as drivers pounded their horns, wrenched steering wheels and scraped their tyres in a bid to inch their way out. There were footsteps, someone running, cries and shouts, sirens, odd silences. A man she couldn’t see almost singing it: ‘A bomb! A bomb!’
In ten years, Juliet had absorbed the insecurity of the city. She did not avoid declared targets or the scenes of past explosions but was after all not much interested in Christmas shopping in the West End or royal tournaments or Lord Mayor’s shows; nor did she spend time in embassies, barracks and department stores, but she never passed them without being aware. She took note of emergency exits when in crowded or official places, and she acknowledged the briefcase left on the Tube or the van parked outside a bank. She listened.
With some effort, Juliet began to walk. She was trying to get home but while she thought she was heading west, she was making her way south towards the river, confused by the sirens that bounced off tall buildings and made it seem as if a fire engine or ambulance were hurtling towards her round every corner. She had not been close by and had seen nothing but could not seem to get away from it either. Later, she would see in a newspaper the office block with its blown-out windows holding their broken blinds like handkerchiefs. A bomb. She did not recognise anything.
Jacob had not been going to open the door but was made curious by the silence of whoever it was and the way they kept rattling the handle. He had been listening to the radio and had heard the news. Juliet looked alright, just a bit stiff. Then she held up her scraped hands. He led her to an armchair and noticed, as she sat down, that her knees were bleeding. He wrapped her in a blanket, fetched a cup of warm water and pulled off his t-shirt, which he used as a cloth as, tenderly and minutely, he cleaned her cuts. He gave her whiskey by the teaspoon, and then sweet tea. They each recognised the rituals of shock and enjoyed them. He laid her down on the army cot and when she turned away, placed a hand on the small of her back and said, ‘Breathe’. The pain disappeared instantly. Jacob sat beside her all night, one hand pressing her head to the pillow.
An Irresponsible Age Page 5