No one heard Jacob come downstairs and leave, so when Carlo went up to knock on Juliet’s door he was surprised to find her alone.
‘Is Fred very cross?’ she asked.
‘He’s spent half the night with Caroline on his knee and right now he’s walking her home. I don’t think he’ll be cross.’
‘Then he’s not here to say goodbye?’
‘You didn’t even attend your own leaving party. Why should anyone stick around to say goodbye?’
‘I didn’t mean not to want a party. It was just that I had a lot to do and seeing all those parts of my life in one room, well it was …’
‘You’re a secretive little bugger, aren’t you? I thought all that not sharing was a boy thing.’ He hugged her in passing. ‘I’ll take your bags down to the car. Now go and give Mary and Bella a kiss.’
‘I can’t face anyone.’
‘They’re asleep, they won’t notice.’
Juliet crept into Fred’s room and brushed her lips against their cheeks so lightly, that even if they had been awake they might not have noticed. As it was, Bella’s dream adjusted to this touch and the lion from the cemetery reached down and skimmed her face with his paw. She formed a fist and punched, catching Juliet in the eye.
At the airport, Carlo sidled into a cubicle to use a phone. It was no bigger, and no more private, than a segment of a playground roundabout.
‘Ma, it’s me. I thought you’d want to know she got off safely … Sorry, did I wake you? … Good, it’s just you sound … She’ll be back for Christmas … Me? I’m fine. It’s you I worry about …’
Carlo hung up and rang Jonathan Mehta, whose number he now knew by heart.
As the plane swung west over car parks and golf courses, civic lakes, roundabouts, sewage works, dual carriageways, the drab tessellations of processing plants and light industry and a surprising amount of green, Juliet liked to think she had flown over Khyber Road and that they were all just as she had left them and would stay that way till she came back: Mary and Bella tucked up, Fred and Caroline hand in hand, Allie crouched under the roof, Hannelore, Ritsu and Sara poised to surround her, Jacob on the stairs, perhaps, Clara circling and Carlo keeping watch.
Juliet rewrote the previous night, starting with the moment when everyone had shouted ‘Surprise!’, when she had had a premonition of horrible muddle, of them all adrift and crashing into one another. In this revised version, she thought of something clever and funny to say, and did not notice the two who were missing; nor did she hear them under her window when they had turned up later, together.
As Jane sat in a department-store coffee shop composing a note to Graham, he caught Caroline coming out of the bathroom and pulled away her towel. ‘One last fuck,’ he said, grabbing at her nipples. ‘One last fuck, you dirty stop-out. I think old Jane is beginning to get the idea, so let’s make it a good one.’ He pressed the palm of his right hand hard against her groin and rubbed in a brisk circle. His other hand kneaded her buttocks and she winced as he tried to push a finger with a ragged nail between them.
‘I want to fuck you up the, er, the –’ Alone, Graham had said this line many times, till he came in his fist having let the dry skin of his hand chafe against his cock because that was how he imagined it must feel, to do it to someone there.
‘I want to fuck you up the ass,’ he said aloud at last, pushing her along the corridor into her bedroom and back into the sour air of the night before.
Caroline sat down on the bed and asked, ‘Do you know how?’
Graham, proudly wriggling out of his trousers, was so surprised by this response that he lifted one leg having forgotten that he had just lifted the other, and fell to the floor. ‘Fuck, fuck …’
‘And can you say “arse”, please, because “ass” doesn’t sound dirty enough.’
With that, it became exciting again because this was what Graham liked best about Caroline, that she was so frank and efficient, and how what they did had nothing to do with anything else, nothing at all.
As he stood up, Caroline rolled onto all fours. Graham stared at her buttocks, and between them at darkness and dark hair. He trembled. ‘Shouldn’t I use some … something?’
She was rocking herself back towards him. ‘Baby oil, butter, whatever.’
He stepped back. ‘You mean you really will?’
Caroline sat back and looked at his frightened penis. She never wanted to see it again.
When the plane was halfway through the arc of its journey, and the map on the screen showed it blinking over the ocean and near neither Greenland nor Labrador, Juliet began to panic. I don’t like places I can’t get out of. She wanted to sleep but her eyes felt so dry that it hurt to close them. Whiskey, wine, coffee and half a glass of lukewarm water. Her body itched and her back throbbed, and even though she knew it was because she had been sitting in this cramped seat for several hours, she thought this was the beginning of the bad pain because she had forgotten that there could be any other kind. She took some pills, just in case.
Later she rewrote the night once more, but this time had everything live up to her fears. Caroline would ditch Fred and go off with her sleepy friend’s husband, the one she was screwing anyway. Fred would write poems. Their mother would never speak again and their father would drive into a tree. Tania would have long lunches with Barbara Dart, who would charm her into being malicious about Juliet. Carlo would get beaten up by the skinheads on the estate. Clara, having met Jacob on the doorstep, would keep him there.
Too easy. Jacob would fall in love with Sara, who would agonise and then succumb because Juliet wasn’t there to be faced. She would return to London next year and have to confront them at parties. People she knew from the Institute would invite them to dinner. More. Sara would be taken to see Jacob’s mother, who would dandle her grandchild on her knee. Sara would design galleries for foreign cities and Jacob would write the seminal cultural text for the turn of the century. No one would remember Juliet Clough, teaching somewhere or other. She curled up in her seat and buried her head. There would be an exhibition of Sara’s award-winning models at Tania’s gallery. Barbara Dart would fund it.
Pain pried apart feelings so compacted that Juliet had only ever been aware of them as a mass in which she could not discern good from bad, or being hurt from being loved. Her world had come loose, which felt like a good thing when she was with Jacob and a bad thing when she thought about Tobias.
Not wanting, for now, things to become clear, she moved to confuse them once more. There they all were, only Sara was not with Jacob. It was Clara he stood next to, over a coffin. Tears came to Juliet’s eyes at last. Clara with yet another golden baby in her arms and Jacob beside her. Juliet’s thoughts swam towards a dream in which she opened the coffin and saw herself and knew that the plane had crashed, and then she was asleep and the relief of crying gave way to the stab of changing pressure as the plane sidled down through the clouds to land in the middle of an American day.
Carlo lay naked on his front beneath a tall window veiled in calico as Jonathan Mehta warmed oil between his hands and then ran them over Carlo’s back before checking and releasing each vertebra of his spine.
‘Ow!’
‘Sorry. Too strong? I’ll start with your shoulders instead, where you said you had that knot.’
‘Ow!’
‘Sorry.’
Carlo winced as Jonathan’s fingers meddled and jabbed. Jonathan Mehta. He was naked in the presence of Jonathan Mehta and Jonathan Mehta was massaging his back. A hand swooped from the nape of his neck to his tailbone, nudging briskly at the towel that covered his bottom. Something deep in Carlo leapt towards that touch and then the fingers began to pinch his collarbone, setting off needling bursts of pain. He concentrated on trying not to cry out.
‘…Yes, contemporary dance,’ Jonathan was saying. ‘But not any more.’
‘Really?’ Carlo tried to remember how they had got on to contemporary dance.
‘Injury.’
‘Really? What?’ He couldn’t resist: ‘I’m a doctor.’
‘Really? I dropped someone.’
‘Oh. I thought you were the one with the injury.’
‘I was. I am. He fell on me. I dropped him … on myself.’ At this Jonathan lifted his hands away and Carlo was shocked by the loss of contact.
When he had dressed and paid (‘How did you find me?’ ‘Your card. On the noticeboard. At the cinema.’ ‘Oh, the cinema.’), Carlo went home to take some painkillers. He lay in a confusion of bliss and discomfort, deciding in the end that Jonathan Mehta’s clumsiness made him more possible than Carlo had thought, which had been, for months now, not possible at all.
Jonathan closed the door, lay down on the couch and breathed. Carlo Clough. At school he might have been Charlie Clough; at university, Carl. Still more or less young – mid-twenties? – but a doctor and grown-up enough to return to his full name. He had taken off his clothes and stood there frankly until Jonathan said ‘Lie down, please’, taking in the padded shoulders and chest, the firm cushions on the belly and hips, and how this man carried his fat like ceremonial armour and was perhaps proud of it, and anyway ought to be because the overall effect was seductive.
Jacob could not have picked a better time to turn up on his wife’s doorstep. She was delighted that he had arrived while she had some adventurous music playing and photographs of artworks scattered across the fleecy rug that lay between her two sofas. She did not explain and he did not ask which, these days, she found reassuring. In this spirit, she produced two cold bottles of Mexican lager.
‘Do you have any limes?’
She had limes.
He followed her into the kitchen and pulled some salad leaves from a bowl.
‘What’s this, red chicory?’
‘From that little man on Green Lanes. The Greek with the daughter you couldn’t take your eyes off.’
‘Yes,’ said Jacob, licking his lips, ‘I remember.’ It was understood between them that Jacob was allowed to savour beautiful women; he made a point of it. They could be sixteen or sixty but if they provoked a response, Jacob let them know. Alert and subtle in most things, in this he was overt. He patted his hair and licked his lips (as Clara, right now licking her lips in front of the bathroom mirror, remembered), and most of all he stared and when the woman in question became aware of this lovely man making himself so clear, she became more animated, better lit.
It would have been enough for Barbara for Jacob to acknowledge this, but he would not allow it. She was imagining it all. Patting his hair and licking his lips? How vulgar. Yes of course he noticed beautiful women, but especially old women, and Barbara was crass to think that this appreciation was sexual. ‘You do tend to forget, Bar, quite what an innocent I am.’ So this was her compromise – to let him know she knew by sharing the looking.
‘I saw her at the pool the other evening. In the showers. She’s rather delicious.’
‘Yes.’ Jacob ran a hand down Barbara’s hip.
‘High round tits like an odalisque and dark … really dark …’
Later, when Jacob lay in the hammock on the balcony and Barbara sat ostentatiously on the rail, he said, ‘She left me.’
No she didn’t, thought Barbara. She’s gone to America and anyway, you never formally left me. She did not resist as he reached for her hand and pulled her down into the hammock.
‘Lie on top of me.’
Barbara did so but Jacob, absorbed back into himself, made no accommodation. She felt the clash of their bones and moved over.
Jacob’s hand caught against her breast and squeezed it routinely.
‘She left me.’ He rarely spoke with such satisfaction.
ELEVEN
From the day on which Juliet arrived in Littlefield, she felt herself to be living under trees. Leaves bristled in each of the nine windows of her cavernous apartment. They looked tough and dull until the sun hit when, as if switched on, they lit up with the lurid purity of emerald and lime. Juliet observed this precisely. There was not much else to do.
The one other woman in her department was the professor who had invited her there, Merle Dix. She was in her forties, and spoke and dressed in a quietly detailed European manner. In London she had had time to talk to Juliet, who had felt so delighted and grateful that she arrived in Littlefield with the expectation that they would become something like best friends, only here Merle was always busy and when they met accelerated past calling out something about meeting for coffee. Juliet was disappointed and when she phoned Carlo imitated Merle’s voice – a midwest accent buttoned up on leaving home and stretched in odd places by time spent in London, Berlin and Rome. Carlo told Juliet not to mock and pointed out the odd angles in her own diction. As children, all the Cloughs had tried to fit in more than they would now care to admit.
In those last days of August, the sun slammed down. Everything else appeared strong enough to take it: the leathery leaves, the pumped-up squirrels and wiry chipmunks, the buffed brick, the thickly painted clapboard, the robust young. Light shoved and bounced, and Juliet crept to her office and talked to her students as they sat nursing bottles of water. She sought shade, but it made no difference. She kept her head down in defence against the light, and began to imagine that she had to crouch because of all those branches. In fact, the trees were as ardently managed as anything else that belonged to the town and their branches were kept out of reach.
Am I short? she asked Carlo in her first letter. I’m not, am I? Only here I feel like Mrs Pepperpot. I said so to someone the other day and they said ‘Mrs who?’ so I explained that she’s a character in a children’s story who shrinks and has adventures and they said, ‘She does?’ which of course I took to be a question and answered in full whereas it was probably a remark, like ‘Hi, how are you.’ Everyone replies ‘Good, how are you’, regardless. It’s also not a question – more a case of call and response.
‘I’ve had a letter from Juliet,’ Carlo told Fred. He was steadying a ladder while Fred attempted to clear the gutters at Khyber Road.
‘How is she?’
‘Facetious.’
Fred was standing on tiptoe, brandishing a ladle. ‘It’s no good, I’d better get the remote.’
‘The remote?’
‘It’s by the TV. Would you fetch it?’
Carlo went off and shouted ‘I can’t find it!’ He returned with a snooker cue. ‘I thought this might be more useful.’
Fred took the cue. ‘That is the remote.’ He angled one end into the gutter and began to flick wads of rotten leaves into the air.
The night before, Fred had been woken by gurgles and drips, and had called up to the attic, ‘Allie, the house is leaking!’ before remembering that Allie had moved back in with his parents. ‘Tarpaulin!’ Fred exclaimed, rushing round the house looking for anything that might pass. He came across a cycling cape, cut it into large squares, found a hammer and some nails, and made his way up to the attic.
Proud and exhausted, he had gone back to bed but the dripping continued. He rang Carlo, who had just got home and who was too tired to explain what a gutter was, so offered to come round in the morning.
Carlo continued: ‘Can’t imagine what she’s like as a teacher.’
‘She’s teaching? I thought it was just research.’
‘No. Graduate students teach some of the basic courses to the undergraduates.’
‘What’s she teaching then?’
‘Painting by numbers, dot-to-dot, that kind of thing.’
‘Oh,’ said Fred. ‘Is that postmodern?’
If I close my eyes, wrote Juliet, it could be a desert, the air feels so solidly burning and dry. And the light is vicious. It thrusts everything at you and everything is huge and most of it is trees. There were trees everywhere in London too, except in places like Khyber Road, but they did not encroach. They had character and were interestingly out of step with their surroundings. They told you what a place used to be or what it hoped to b
ecome. And my students surround me after class like an anxious forest, looming and leaning and asking me to repeat myself.
‘She seems to think her students are trees.’ Carlo had pulled out the letter to read the rest to Fred. More rain was falling and they had gone inside. ‘I bet she talks to them as if they were. I bet they hate her. Patronising little so-and-so.’
‘They hate us all there these days, don’t they?’ Fred asked.
‘It’s a generational thing,’ explained Carlo. ‘You see it in medicine, too. The older ones loved us and wanted to be us and then hated us because they weren’t, while the current lot think they can be us better than we can while hating us at the same time.’
‘Now that really is postmodern,’ Fred announced confidently and then slumped white on the sofa and began to sob.
To give himself a chance to work out how to approach this, Carlo offered to make some tea. In the kitchen, nothing was obviously wrong but once Carlo saw one thing, he kept noticing more. The fridge contained a number of empty cartons and wrappers. The crockery looked as if it had not been disturbed for some time. There was a layer of un-use on everything – a kind of dust that seemed less natural than dirt. Carlo went upstairs. Fred’s room could not be entered and his swirl of mess had enlarged until it became fixed, immovable. In Juliet’s room, Carlo found Fred’s pyjamas on the bed and his suit on the back of the door.
Fred was still on the sofa, rocking and sobbing. Carlo sat down and threw an arm around his shoulders. Fred looked too thin, too hectic, but he always had been and so no one noticed when he became more so.
An Irresponsible Age Page 11