‘Steady on. She’s only been gone two weeks.’
‘No,’ Fred whimpered, ‘not her.’
Of course, thought Carlo. ‘We all miss her.’ He had meant to say ‘him’, ‘We all miss him’, only his words had lingered on his first and more manageable thought.
‘No.’
‘And him,’ Carlo found it hard to say, ‘we miss him, too.’
There it was. Were they about to admit to each other that since Tobias’s death the texture of life had become uncontrollably variable, stretching and crumbling, their feelings too? That everything had lost shape and now whatever shape there was kept changing?
Fred looked up, bewildered. ‘Who?’
‘Tobias.’
‘Tobias. No. Yes, I mean but –’
Whatever else there was, Carlo didn’t want to know. He knew enough. ‘Are you eating?’
‘At work.’
‘You don’t have breakfast? Or cook when you get home?’
‘Do you know what it’s like to put one plate on a table?’
‘I do it every day. Why don’t you eat?’
‘I don’t have time for breakfast and I’m too tired when I get home.’
‘But you used to. You were always knocking up offerings for what’s her name.’
‘Caroline.’ Fred’s voice was firm but his eyes filled once more with tears.
‘Oh dear,’ said Carlo, clamping Fred to his side. ‘Things not going well?’
‘Caroline Broad-Jones is marrying Oliver Twerp next Saturday. After their honeymoon, they are flying out to Hong Kong, where Oliver works for some bank.’
‘You’re making it up.’
‘No, it’s perfectly true.’
‘Broad-Jones and Twerp?’
‘Well, not Twerp. It’s Thorp actually, but if you give it an English spin …’
‘Hong Kong?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what happened with that jerk Graham then, the one with the wife?’
‘Graham? Nothing. He was just her landlord.’
‘Right … So Juliet is in America, Caroline is going to Hong Kong –’
‘When everything should stay as it was, it was all fine, and now, just because Tobias is dead …’
There was a silence before Carlo said, ‘He is, isn’t he,’ and then there was no Caroline or Jonathan Mehta, there was no one else at all because Carlo and Fred were alone and here was a brother, the only person who knew what it was like for a brother to lose a brother.
At the Quondam Building, Barbara led Clara up the stairs and then handed her the key and stood back. The room was smaller, darker and colder than the library at home, but Clara was delighted. She could feel, or liked to imagine she could feel, the hum of contemplation and industry as all around her other artists set about their work while the ghosts of those first artists, from sixty years ago, looked on.
They went out for a drink to celebrate and talked a little about themselves. There was no mention of Juliet, and Jacob’s name came up only as they were parting, when Barbara made an extraordinary and irresistible request.
Juliet wanted to submit to America as a foreign country, which it had turned out to be. She was having trouble making herself understood. Syntax, inflection and connotation refused to translate, and there was something about the cleanliness of the American sentence, no matter how grandly constructed, which made her feel over-elaborate. There was a cleanliness to the landscape as well, which she found refreshing. There were no ruins; nothing looked old (or at least no more than picturesque) and everything looked simple. It is, she wrote in the notebook in which she was supposed to be gathering research material, as if my different geography and history give me a different sense of space and time. It’s not just my metaphysics that are different, but my physics, too. It was all rather demanding, which Juliet decided to enjoy as something bound to turn out to have been good for her.
She enjoyed staying in her room and imagining America, and allowed her idea of the grandeur that lay beyond the trees to dignify her loneliness. She acquired the luxurious kind of anxiety that blossoms when there is enough money and time not to get on with things. She worried about the trees, and about her purpose, about her siblings and her parents too, but more as figures on a board than people whose lives shaped her own. If she thought about Jacob, it was of him as a sensation. He was a shiver, a frisson, a prickling of desire; quite overwhelming but no more substantial than that. At this point, she got as much pleasure from her detachment as she did from her susceptibility.
She felt fine until one night when she called home, not Khyber Road but Allnorthover. The telephone rang and rang, and Juliet could not remember a time when there had been no one there to answer.
She acquired an old Ford Mercury, which had neither air conditioning nor windows that opened but which more or less drove itself. She went to see a famous German architect who came to speak in the nearby town of Mount South. Juliet sat in the front row and made notes. Merle Dix was there with her husband, a pony-tailed theatre critic with a name like a car-part, and when the event was over, they stood by the door and signalled to the German architect while Juliet asked him yet another question. He made his excuses and disappeared. Everyone disappeared and so Juliet drove slowly back to Littlefield and told herself that she had only imagined seeing them – Merle Dix, the car-part (Ratchon?) and the German – laughing and hurrying into a restaurant together. She stopped at a backstreet shop with no name, the only place in Littlefield where you could buy a bottle of wine. It was handed over in a brown paper bag. ‘Thank you,’ said Juliet, as the man put the bottle on the counter. ‘Thank you,’ he replied as he took her money. ‘Thank you,’ she repeated as she took her change, ‘Thank you’ again as she picked up her bag, and ‘Thank you’ one last time as she went through the door. The man did not look as if he did not understand so much as if he did not hear. When she pulled up in the drive, she startled a skunk who sprayed the side of the car. ‘And thank you,’ Juliet shouted after it, amazed by the acrid stink and also by how cartoonish the animal had been.
The trees are bad enough, she wrote in another long letter to Carlo, but they are full of machines, or that’s what it sounds like. Punky blue and red birds that sound like dentists’ drills. Crickets that rattle away all night, or are they cicadas? What’s a cicada? How do you pronounce cicada? Or are they grasshoppers? There are frogs, too, like stuck gears, and what I think is a woodpecker because it sounds as if it is doing exactly that.
‘You need some sleep,’ Carlo observed as he turned the page.
And I need some sleep, the letter went on. It’s too quiet and too lonely and they haven’t given me that much to do. Love to All. J. PS: After I wrote this, I went out to a bar. I’ve taken up smoking again because here it’s considered such a vice and the only place you can smoke in public is the sports bar because it’s across the town line. It’s noisy and packed but no one takes any notice and anyway I met an Englishman and got drunk so feel better. He has small feet and wears snakeskin shoes. Neat and a bit vicious, I suspect. But a laugh – singular – Ha. A start, no? Ha. xxx.
‘She’s getting drunk with strangers,’ Carlo said.
‘Oh dear,’ Fred responded absently, ‘I’d better write.’
The English stranger was called Terence Bull and while Juliet had been walking around Littlefield with her head down, not noticing anything, he had noticed her.
‘May I sit down?’ He was a small man with severely side-parted hair. His cheeks were scraped pink by a cutthroat razor, which he found aesthetically enticing but did not handle well. Juliet mistook his redness for shyness.
‘You’re English!’ She had, she thought later, as good as flung her arms round him. ‘God. Sorry. It’s just I’m –’
‘Bored?’ He sat with elaborate awkwardness, drawn back, legs crossed and thrown to one side, his head tilted so that the gaze of his small round eyes suggested provocation as much as scrutiny.
‘Bloody bored.’
And then she wasn’t because that evening, Juliet loved America – its sincerely helpful waitresses, its plain-speaking approach to cocktails, its tall plastic beakers of iced water, its corn chips which tasted white, yellow and blue, its sloppy tomato salsa, and later, its night, which was warm and fresh and made her feel that the world was swarming gently round her.
‘Now I see the point of the trees!’ Juliet did not know that she was shouting. ‘It’s like the circling wagon train!’ Terence winced and a group of students they were passing sniggered. Juliet, oblivious, stopped in the road and fumbled for her point: ‘It is! America, it just goes on and on, which is great of course, really great, you can keep moving and all that on the road lark –’
‘Cool!’ shouted one of the students and Juliet heard this time but did not catch his tone. She walked up to the boy, who looked perturbed. At least now she spoke quietly.
‘Fucking cool, actually. The trees are your wagons. With them, or should I say within them, you draw your clearing, your circle, your frame.’ She was nodding and the boy began to nod too, but Juliet was not convinced. ‘You don’t know yet. You’re too young. In a few years though, you’ll need, you’ll need your own …’ The thought that had moved swiftly and brightly through the muzz of cocktails and tobacco, jumped its tracks.
‘Trees?’ one of the other students suggested. Juliet stared at the pavement. Had they been talking about trees? Terence stepped forward, took her elbow between thumb and forefinger, and steered her away.
The students looked at one another.
‘If we don’t need our own trees, we must need our own wagons.’
‘Drunk bitch. Did you smell her breath?’
‘Circle or clearing?’
‘Cute, though.’
A week later, the temperature dropped ten degrees overnight. Juliet felt as empty as the air, not least because she now understood that this was not a holiday, which was half about going and half about coming back; this was being away.
She had written three letters to Carlo. Her parents phoned, and her friends sent faxes and postcards. At first she was relieved that no one mentioned Jacob, then she began to think that it was because they did not take her seriously.
‘You never ask about Jacob,’ she said to Clara, whom she phoned each week.
‘Oh. I thought that was all …’
‘It is. I’m just surprised no one cares.’
‘I suppose we thought it wasn’t anything much and you were going and didn’t say anything yourself, so we just left it.’
‘Fine. I’ve left it too.’
‘Good.’
‘Good?’
‘It wasn’t a great idea.’
There was something in Clara’s tone, an insistence behind the urging, that prickled Juliet: ‘You don’t even know him.’
‘No, but I –’
‘You don’t know him. It was just beginning and it might have become something.’
‘He’s forty-three; he has a wife he still spends a fair bit of time with and they’ve been married for fifteen years. He got himself sacked from the university and his TV series breached so many rules, it was pulled off air. Not good.’
‘How do you know all that?’
‘Oh – people.’
‘People?’
‘I really have to go, Horace is yelling.’
‘I wish you hadn’t called him that.’
‘I only meant that he wasn’t a good idea. Now –’
‘Not him. Horace. It’s a ridiculous name. Your children have such silly names.’
‘Why are we talking about my children’s names?’
‘Because we’re not talking about Jacob.’
‘We just did. Alright, Horrie darling, I’m coming!’
‘Not really. I haven’t told you anything.’
‘That’s just what I said.’
‘There’s a lot you don’t know, Clara.’
‘I’m sure there is. Are you alright?’ This was a real question.
Juliet’s throat ached. She was deciding to say something truthful when the line was filled with a child’s yells and Clara’s muffled apologies because Horace was beside himself and she really had to go.
On the last day of September, Juliet slipped on the steps outside the English Department building and when she got up, her body wouldn’t straighten out. Terence took her to a doctor, who recommended an osteopath. Both were paid for by the college’s medical insurance scheme.
The doctor took a full history. ‘Any previous back problems, Ms Clough?’ she asked.
‘Not exactly,’ replied Juliet. ‘I have this, um, condition.’
‘Condition?’
‘Pain, heavy bleeding, that kind of thing.’
The doctor, whose formality appealed to Juliet, prompted her gently but precisely. When she had a complete picture, she asked what investigations Juliet’s British doctor had arranged.
‘I’m supposed to have a scan and then maybe an operation, just to have a look.’
‘When?’
‘Oh,’ said Juliet. ‘Around now. Only I’m not there, am I?’ She laughed.
The doctor offered to arrange a scan.
‘Can you come in on the fourth?’ Two days time.
Juliet lay back in the dark and stared at her insides as they floated into view on a screen. There were shadows, clouds, plumes of white and nuggets of black. The woman doing the scan kept freezing the screen and fixing pictures in which Juliet could see nothing of obvious importance. It was all so shifting and vague, one thing obscuring the other, and none of it staying still for long enough to be made sense of.
That evening the telephone rang and when Juliet answered, no one spoke. This had happened four or five times now, and every time she had been on the verge of speaking only she understood that Jacob wanted her not to. The click she heard when he ended the call left her more bereft than his voice might have done, and so she would try to retrieve him through a remembered gesture or phrase. Scenes and conversations left her wondering if her memories were half imagined – they made so little sense.
The one she returned to most often was when he had finally come upstairs that last night at Khyber Road. He had stood in the doorway, staring in his peculiarly active way and using just a corner of his smile. For a moment Juliet thought he might be about to apologise but as she looked at him with the idea of someone unreliable and dangerous, he returned the image of a simple presence offering love. His stillness became injury and endurance as if there were no wife, as if he had always held himself out to her, as if it were she who resisted and refused, an assertion she could not argue with because once, she had meant to.
So she had asked him, straight out: ‘Should I be leaving you?’
TWELVE
Merle turned up on Juliet’s doorstep with a basket of fruit and a selection of warming pads, ice packs and massage devices. Juliet was managing on whiskey, painkillers and hot-water bottles, and although the osteopath had realigned her neck with one swift click, her muscles were still rigid and her back bruised.
Merle looked around the stark apartment at the neat stacks of books; no pictures, no mirrors.
‘If you feel up to it, come to dinner on Saturday. It’ll just be us and Terence, quite informal.’
Juliet was amazed.
On her way to the dinner, she stopped at a wholefood supermarket called The Higher Realm for a bottle of wine, thinking that Merle would appreciate something organic. She parked next to a car which had a bumper sticker reading ‘Commit random acts of beauty’, and scraped it on the way out.
Ratchon, whose name was actually Rogen, served a fine pouilly fumé.
‘That steak looks great!’ Juliet said determinedly, as Merle put a plate in front of her.
‘It’s tuna, actually,’ said Merle and even though she spoke quite gently, Juliet was stung.
‘Do Americans say “actually”?’
Terence intervened: ‘Actually, the only tuna the English eat comes out of t
ins. Almost everything we eat comes out of tins.’
Juliet did not like this. ‘Not in my house.’
‘Yes, well …’ Terence pursed his mouth and his cheeks looked full, as if he had decided to withhold the most delectable piece of information but only so far. Juliet was overwhelmed by a longing for home – not Khyber Road, but the village of Allnorthover.
‘Tell us about your family,’ Rogen suggested.
‘Oh do,’ murmured Terence as he topped up her glass.
Juliet thought for a moment. ‘My brother …’ she began.
‘Who was in a band called Vermin Death Stack and who rescued the girl who was almost drowned by Ron the loony …’ recited Terence.
‘Tom. No, the other one.’
‘The boy who thought he was a puddle?’
‘Not really, never mind. The thing is …’
Merle sighed, which made Juliet more determined to go on. People loved this story; they always laughed. She was finding it hard not to laugh just at the thought of it.
‘When my brother Fred was studying for his A-levels, he used to lie outside on the lawn, revising. There were these students living in the east wing of the house, because the rest of us had left home, and they spent their time devising ways of creeping up on him.’
‘The east wing,’ Terence mouthed to Merle, as if transmitting a code.
Juliet noticed but ignored him. This was something she liked to remember. ‘They frightened the life out of him every afternoon,’ she continued, ‘usually because he was half asleep, and then one day –’
‘Great. Dessert, Rogen?’ said Merle, meaning to rescue Juliet.
‘No, wait! That’s not the story. Wait …’ Juliet settled back in her chair, swigged her wine and beamed so uncharacteristically at her audience that they submitted.
‘One afternoon Fred was lying out there when he heard the French windows open,’ – another look passed between Terence and Merle – ‘and the crunch-crunch-crunch of someone crossing the gravel path. OK? So he’s lying there pretending to be asleep, listening to Radio One on his transistor –’
An Irresponsible Age Page 12