Juliet’s initial reaction was to retreat but as Clara’s voice broke down and she buried her face in a pillow, Juliet went to pick up the receiver and hang up. She even listened for a moment, in case whoever it was at the other end had relented and after all Clara’s pleading would now speak, but they did not and so Juliet lay down beside her sister, placed a hand on her back and waited to find out what she could do to help.
TWENTY-ONE
Juliet finished the course of white pills. A week later she had a period but it was nothing; there was no pain, just a few days of thin bright blood. Two weeks after that she started to bleed again, more heavily. Her back seized up and she understood that the pills had stopped working and she was about to step out of their fog. Jacob remembered how she had been in Khyber Road and he looked after her. No one could have been more patient or kind.
When the pain got worse, she did not say so but she wanted her mother. Her parents had not been in touch for two months so she went off to phone them and came back in looking crushed.
Jacob sat down beside her. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘My mother is becoming a nun. At least, she’s spent another two months on retreat.’
‘How interesting.’
‘It’s not, it’s selfish. What about my father?’
‘Isn’t he in Salisbury?’
‘That’s the point. What’s he doing spending all his pension, all the family money, on some run-down shack?’
‘Perhaps they want to move there. It’s got to be a better place than Allnorthover.’
‘Allnorthover’s alright; it’s character-building. The thing is, my mother hasn’t had anything to do with this cottage. She hasn’t even gone there. What if they start leading separate lives? It could be dangerous.’
‘You should feel lucky.’
‘I don’t. It makes me have to think about them.’
‘Do try to calm down and remember that your body is going through a big readjustment.’
‘You think I’m being hormonal?’
‘No, I think you’re being totally over-emotional. Now go to bed.’
Juliet obeyed. She loved being teased by him and told what to do. She missed her brothers and sister.
The next morning Jacob said, ‘I’m taking you away next weekend – for your birthday.’
‘Another treat?’
‘Is that a complaint?’
‘No, but there are so many …’
‘Why do you have to qualify every good thing?’
‘I don’t mean to. It’s lovely.’
He pulled her towards him. ‘Let’s just be.’
This sounded like the answer to everything and Juliet resolved to enjoy whatever Jacob had in store for her.
They drove north over the Connecticut River and then north-east up through New Hampshire and into Vermont, where the hills massed and the snow lingered. There were broken-backed barns, splayed picket fences, antique tractors and warehouses stuffed full of New England bric-a-brac for sale. Juliet found the plates, lace, cruets, knitted toys and tarnished silver depressing. She almost bought a stained patchwork quilt and a three-legged stool but remembered that in June she was going back to England, a place full of such things.
Jacob did not consult a map and brought them with nonchalant pride to their destination. Flagpole House was the oldest surviving building in the town of Nuthatch, and it was the most nurtured New England clapboard house Juliet had seen. The fresh paintwork was in muted greens and crimped icicles trimmed the edge of the roof.
The hallway was dark. No one appeared, not even after Jacob rang a bell which he found perched on a doily on top of a mahogany bureau. The bell was a souvenir from a cathedral in Europe, its handle an ungenerous cross. It made little noise.
‘Hullo,’ called Jacob, too quietly.
‘Hello!’ shouted Juliet.
‘Oh, you must be the Darts.’ A tall figure rose up in one of the shadowy reception rooms. ‘Karen Courtney-O’Brien. So lovely to see you.’ She was tall and spare and spoke in such a toneless chirp that Juliet made the mistake of thinking her welcome insincere. ‘We took the place over from the Van Raans last year. Weren’t they dear?’
‘Yes,’ said Jacob, ‘terribly.’
‘Yes they were,’ added Juliet, wanting to be polite. Jacob frowned.
‘We have everything ready for you in the Hinge Suite. Let’s get you settled in.’
They bumped along into a severely heated room dominated by a four-poster bed. Jacob announced that he was going for a walk.
‘I’ll stay and explore,’ said Juliet, a little dutifully.
The story of the house, its history and renovation, was on hand in a folder of laminated pages. It’s a hundred years old, thought Juliet, so is Khyber Road. In London, it’s hard to live in something that isn’t. The room looked authentic, but was proving unfriendly. The armchairs, one too low, the other too narrow, eased her back out as soon as she sat down, and the bed was topped with a slippery fireproof coverlet. There were six books on a shelf – poetry, botany and local history – and perfume atomisers and bone-backed brushes arranged on the dresser. The room contained four mirrors, all warped and at odd heights. Juliet had to tug at the drawers, and the hangers in the wardrobe were skewed because it was so shallow.
On the sloping desk, a visitors’ book had been turned to a fresh page. Beside it was a fountain pen and a bottle of ink. There was a log fire sealed behind glass in a brick chimney breast. Juliet thought it must be decorative until she turned what looked like an oven knob and flames appeared.
Jacob came in. ‘I’ve booked a table for eight.’ He unlaced his boots, sat on the bed and looked at her. ‘Are you cold?’
‘My brain can’t make sense of this. It looks like fire and I can feel its heat but I don’t believe in it.’
‘You find the place unconvincing?’
‘No, no, I like it. It’s beautiful. You were so clever to find it. They’ve done it up very carefully, I know, but it’s a little bit –’
‘Chi-chi?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘More so than an English country-house hotel?’
‘I don’t know, I’ve never stayed in one. Really, this is beautiful,’ and then knowing what Jacob valued more, ‘and so interesting. I don’t know about America on a domestic scale. Every idea we’ve been given of the place has been epic, hasn’t it? All about adventure, battles and quests.’
‘You’re making it sound like Arthurian England.’
‘But we’ve had kitchen-sink England, too. And kitchen-sink Europe: clocks ticking in drawing rooms, Madame Bovary, Vuillard, Ibsen, provincial entropy …’
‘Entropy? It is a fashionable word but I’m not sure you know what you mean by it. Besides, there are countless American works about small-town life.’
‘Oh. Yes. Of course there are. It just seems different, to us, from the European version. Pioneering, for a start. And in Europe, one small town is only a hill or valley away from another. Here, they can be a detail in a wilderness.’
‘A clearing in the forest? A circle of wagon trains on the prairie? The space that ceases to be a space as soon as you enter it with your gaze? Do you really think you’re the first person to have thought about that?’
Juliet had been thinking and writing about it for years. She felt cautious now, knowing that if she pursued this conversation, Jacob might say something that would unravel her ideas to the point where she would throw out thousands of words and want to start again.
‘I might have one of those muffins to keep me going. Do you want one?’
‘Hardly.’
Juliet poured a cup of thin coffee from a plastic thermos jug, toyed with a shrunken red apple in the fruit bowl and examined the basket of muffins. There was a card pinned to the frilly cloth: Welcome back to Flagpole House Jacob and Barbra! Juliet dropped it in front of Jacob who glanced and said, ‘She hates it when people misspell her name like that.’
The irritation of a missing ‘a�
��. There had been other times when Jacob reacted with a sidestep like this, forcing Juliet to adjust to his angle. This, though, was the time that it did not surprise her. She managed to say only that she thought she’d have a shower and went through to the bathroom, where she sank to her knees. There was a sharp pain in her belly and she thought it was her old pain but then realised that this pain was a feeling; not the kind she was used to, but something absolute and raging. I want a real life, not baskets of muffins and bowls of warm milk, not this entropy, and yes that was the right word, this over-invested, under-lived version of the good life. Fuck it, she didn’t even want a particularly good life, so long as it was real.
Dinner was elaborate and delicious, but Juliet was finding it hard to disguise her pain. Jacob moved his chair round next to hers and put his hand on her back, but for once it made the pain worse.
‘Please …’ she began shifting her body away from him.
Jacob observed how pain roughened her features. If he could not cure her of this then it happened without him and when Jacob saw the world turning away from him, he tried to get ahead. He stood up and walked out.
Juliet, unsurprised, watched him go and wondered if he had ever been fully present. Just three months had passed since Jacob had arrived in Littlefield and lifted her up to the snowbound door. Was she going to stop believing in him already?
The bathroom’s plumbing had been modernised so discreetly that Juliet couldn’t work out how to turn the water on. Jacob found her. He twiddled the dials and adjusted the taps while Juliet, ashamed now more than angry, took off her clothes and then his.
She said it: ‘This is not real life.’
He looked so sad, ‘I know.’
They stood under the falling water and embraced with the seriousness of people who know what they are and are relieved to be able to hold onto something.
Clara lay beside her husband in countryside darkness. She could not see her hand or his back, and was in any case too scared to reach; such a gesture might tip the matter irrevocably.
‘Why has this happened?’ she whispered. ‘Am I too old? Too familiar?’
‘No,’ said Stefan, ‘you’re not here.’
‘You go to Geneva.’
‘Where I work, and when I’m here, I’m here. For months you’ve been completely absorbed by something else.’
‘My work.’
‘Really?’
‘Are you trying to suggest that you have been playing around with what’s her name because you thought I was doing the same? Is that your excuse?’
He would not speak.
Of all the things Clara might have said next: ‘Are you in love with her?’
‘Don’t be so vulgar.’
Clara felt the machinery of her life, all that squeezed and tugged at and propelled her, give way: the twenty-two rooms of the house were dust; the children, with their laundry, games, illnesses and noise, hurtled into space; and memories of a train to London, a plane to New York, a painting, a letter, a pink dress, rose in her mind as proof that she had been turning away and that Stefan was right about her being full of something else, not someone though, not really someone.
This pain was as black and clean as the pain she had felt when Tobias died. It cut through the surface of life – its features, polish and grime – and lit up the fundamental, majestic shapes that were ordinarily lost from view. Clara had thought that they would all learn from having lost Tobias. But she had been distracted and Stefan had too, and now it seemed that pain was only pain and that there was simply more or less of it.
There were days when Carlo looked forward to going home. He had given Jonathan a key and liked to find the place lit up and full of his singing. Jonathan sang as he flitted around the kitchen making something intricate for supper; his mealtime chatter was a kind of song and later he might sing Carlo to sleep, too.
‘How were the bodies today?’ Jonathan said as he put down two plates of foamy courgette soufflé. ‘You take yours apart while I put mine back together. You’d have thought my work was the more demanding.’
‘You had a client today?’
‘One of my regulars,’ said Jonathan. ‘Eat up, it’s collapsing.’
Carlo hated the regulars, the men who wanted so much to be touched by Jonathan that they endured his catastrophic massage again and again.
‘You can’t have regulars, can you?’ said Jonathan. ‘Do they seem the same or different?’
‘Different. Often I know what I’ll find but –’
‘Tell me a story,’ Jonathan interrupted. ‘Go on! I’ll tell you one of mine.’
‘I did a post-mortem on a baby this morning. My first one.’
‘How did it die?’
‘In the womb.’
‘No I mean technically, or whatever.’
‘Nothing obvious. They’ll run some tests and maybe we’ll find a cause, maybe not.’
‘You mean it could have died for no reason, just like that?’
‘We don’t always find out why.’
‘But that’s your job isn’t it?’
All Carlo could think of was the list he’d chalked up on the board:
Spleen 1g
Kidneys 10g
Heart 12g
It had looked like what it was – something and nothing.
Going to bed had become about trying to get Carlo to sleep. He did not resist when Jonathan anointed him with lavender, ginger and juniper oil and arranged him in a yoga position known as The Corpse – on his back, arms outstretched, hands facing upwards, legs loosely apart. ‘You’ll snore like a hog, but you will achieve deep sleep.’
If Carlo stirred, Jonathan would jump up and fetch camomile tea or a hot-water bottle and would offer to read, or do anything that might help. Carlo wanted to be helped but sometimes the only thing to do was to lock the bathroom door and masturbate, thinking about men he had glimpsed or imagined, too tired to think about the man who was actually there.
One morning, Jonathan ran his hand down Carlo’s body until it rested on his cock, ‘Remember?’ Carlo smiled and pushed himself into Jonathan’s fingers then began to stroke Jonathan’s balls, arse and thighs, and Jonathan rocked and sighed, ‘Yes, yes,’ but stayed soft. He twisted away from Carlo’s roughness and took his cock in his mouth only Carlo’s need had trapped itself, leaving him stalled and numb. Jonathan’s mouth was too much and not enough. They tried but neither could calibrate his touch to the other.
‘It’s ridiculous,’ said Carlo. ‘I’m so hard, I can’t.’
Jonathan withdrew his body into a curl. ‘Never mind.’
‘We mean well.’
‘Never mind.’
Mary went out to have dinner with Alexander Strachan, and Fred babysat. As he kissed Bella goodnight, she looked up. ‘Egghead.’
Fred smiled.
‘Good?’
‘Yes, it means clever.’
‘I thought it meant bald.’
Fred hurried off to the bathroom mirror. He believed that he was as he had always been and did not expect to change. It’s the worry. Looking after them all. They’re making me lose my hair.
He planned to open a bottle of wine and sit out on the terrace at the back of the house to think about the garden. He liked the idea of land, even more than that of owning a house, and made plans for getting rid of the slugs, for stopping cats shitting in the flowerbeds and for mowing the lawn, but then he had another glass of wine and thought about Caroline. It was only a week since she had gone which meant he might not see her for months but that was alright because it took that long for things to calm down.
Several times now, Caroline had come back from Hong Kong and spent time with Fred. She accepted his devotion as a cat might, according to her own needs and mood. She tidied up, joined in and looked after Bella. When Fred and Mary moved to Botolph Square, Caroline spent three days helping them to unpack after which she was off, heartless and serene. Fred knew no one who lived so evidently in the present moment. He saw it as
a gift.
The doorbell rang and in the end he decided to go and see who it was. ‘Caroline!’ Fred was horrified. ‘I almost ignored it. I thought it must be someone wanting something.’
Caroline brought several bags into the hall while Fred stood and watched, so astonished that he did not think to help.
‘I do want something,’ she said as she walked past him into the living room.
‘Me?’ He made a joke of it, rolled his eyes and then rushed over and threw himself down beside her on the new sofa, his legs getting caught up and kicking against her. She ignored him as she ignored all digressions and surprises.
Fred offered her a drink, jumping up as violently as he had sat down. At times of great excitement, Fred’s mind sped up, his body too. He had been about to run and compromised on a sort of skip.
Caroline followed him. She was concentrating. ‘What if I did want you?’
Fred sloshed wine into glasses and began to drink from one, forgetting to offer her the other. He was supposed to say something now, the words that would make it happen.
‘You don’t want me.’ It was not what he had thought or rehearsed, not even what he meant.
‘Why should I not want you?’
‘Because things are fine as they are.’ He didn’t mean this.
‘You don’t mean that,’ she said just as he thought it, which startled him so much that he retorted, ‘Of course I mean it. I wouldn’t have said it otherwise.’
He drained the first glass of wine and picked up the other. ‘Anyway, you’re supposed to be in Hong Kong. With your husband.’
‘Oliver likes you.’
‘Then he can’t know that you have slept with me.’
‘He does. We tell each other everything.’
‘That’s disgusting!’ Fred finished the second glass and poured two more.
An Irresponsible Age Page 21