An Irresponsible Age

by Lavinia Greenlaw

‘But your stuff …’

  ‘You could ship the books and chuck everything else. Just leave it.’

  ‘We were meant to go back together.’

  ‘I know and I’m sorry, but I’m here now. What can I do?’

  He had been speaking so quietly that if he said goodbye, Juliet didn’t hear him. She looked around the room and realised that even though this was not their house, she could not imagine living with Jacob anywhere else.

  Furious and heartbroken, Juliet walked to the cabin and saw through the window that it was heaped with books, bottles and clothes. He had taken everything of himself from the house and had put it here, as if in storage. It looked like his room at the Shipping Office. She did not open the door, and returning back along the path remembered how Theo’s smile had become laughter as she came on his fingers and how her noise, too, had taken shape as laughter. She threw the key to the cabin into the trees.

  Alexander Strachan found his way to Botolph Square. The sun shone, his head hurt, and the drifting pollen had brought on an attack of hay fever. A child was raking gravel in front of the house.

  ‘Hello,’ Alexander said, and sneezed.

  ‘Bless you,’ the figure straightened up, turned and took off the scarf tied round its head. It was a boy – grubby and foreign-looking, with curly hair set back on his head like a slipping wig. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Fred couldn’t understand why a stranger would stop by the wall, say hello, sneeze and then apologise.

  ‘I thought … I’m looking for Mary George. Is this her house?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is she in?’

  ‘No.’ Fred tugged at a root.

  ‘Oh.’

  Alexander wondered where to start. ‘Alexander Strachan.’ He sneezed again.

  ‘Federico Clough, bless you.’

  ‘You don’t need to, it’s hay fever. The thing is, can I leave a message?’

  ‘Why?’

  Alexander was tired. ‘Are you her gardener?’

  Fred looked down at himself and smiled. ‘That’s right. Miss George’s gardener.’

  Alexander felt in his jacket and found a pen and a piece of paper. ‘I tell you what. I’ll just shove a note through the letterbox.’

  ‘You do that,’ snapped Fred, picking up some secateurs. ‘You do that and I’ll do this.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  When Alexander had gone, Fred let himself back into the house and picked up the note. Dear Mary, Please don’t mind that I came to find you. I hope very much that you might like to find me. Yours, A.S. Fred meant to put it on the hall table but thinking it might get overlooked, decided to take it up to Mary’s room only on the way he went into his own room and left it there.

  Mary did not know what to do about Alexander so meanwhile decided that something had to be done about Fred. One evening as she leant over her sleeping daughter, she ran her hand down her back and not for the first time, blushed as she remembered her hand on Fred’s thigh. Enough.

  She found him in the kitchen and as she had rehearsed, came straight to the point: ‘You ought to know that Caroline has told me.’

  ‘Told you what?’

  ‘How you feel about me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why it isn’t going to work out with her.’

  ‘Who says it’s not going to work out with her?’ Fred remembered the hem of Caroline’s night-dress and how it gathered and slid up to her hip as she tucked her legs beneath her.

  ‘I adore Caroline,’ he said. ‘Always have. You know that.’

  ‘Then why did you tell her you liked me?’

  ‘It seemed a good idea at the time.’

  ‘You used me to make her jealous?’

  Fred was relieved. ‘That must have been it!’

  ‘You used me?’

  ‘Did she sound jealous? Do you think it worked?’

  It didn’t matter. He was himself again and so was she.

  ‘I’ve been working on something for her birthday.’ Fred opened the freezer. ‘Come and look.’

  The top shelf was packed with trays in which tiny flowers had been set in cubes of ice.

  ‘They’re beautiful,’ said Mary. ‘When’s her birthday?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘And you did it before you knew she was coming back?’

  ‘Seems that way.’

  ‘When will you give them to her?’

  ‘I can’t. They’d melt.’

  ‘So what will you do with them?

  ‘Nothing. Do you really think she sounded jealous? What exactly did she say?’

  TWENTY-THREE

  Theo Dorne turned out to be as young as he looked – five years younger than Juliet. He was interested but not curious, and she felt no desire to tell him everything. She spent a lot of time with him out in the sun. Her body felt clearer as her skin grew darker and her hair had come to life now that it reached her shoulders. To Theo, she seemed more wild and golden each time they met.

  The warm days extended into gentle evenings. People sat outside feeling the air on their skin, and were struck by life. The overall mood was one of contingency charged with the threat of electrical storm.

  Theo found a bicycle for Juliet and took her out along the rail-road, over the Connecticut River and on into Mount South. She said nothing but she was excited to see things she had hoped for from America and which now, on this hot night, were revealed: the spill of traffic lights swaying over junctions, a bar called The Salty Dog, teenagers cruising in cars as long and low as boats and bare-chested men riding motorbikes as long as cars.

  ‘Where are we?’ she asked. They were pushing their bicycles down a street full of brash makeshift stores.

  ‘Don’t you know this town?’

  ‘I thought I did. I come here for books, newspapers, the deli, the libraries.’

  ‘What have you been doing all this time?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Well let’s get in here and have some fun.’

  ‘Fun,’ repeated Juliet, feeling uncomfortable.

  The club was called The Covered Dish. Juliet had seen it advertised in the Littlefield Fencepost and recognised the names of some of the bands who played there. It had not occurred to her to go to see them.

  ‘Didn’t you go to clubs in London?’ Theo yelled over the music as they leant against a wall and swigged bottles of beer.

  ‘Yes, but mostly jazz.’

  ‘There’s a jazz band playing here tonight.’

  Juliet was relieved, ‘Great.’

  She felt even better when she saw the band come on stage, a guitarist and a saxophonist, charismatically nondescript, who stood on either side of the stage as if waiting for someone to appear in-between them.

  ‘I know them! They used to play with my brother’s girlfriend. She’s a singer and there’s this great club in Soho called The Glory Hole. They’re called The Natural Fringe.’

  ‘The what?’

  The guitarist approached a microphone and said in an unnecessarily drab London voice: ‘Hello Mount South. We are Smokey Vanilla and the Pirouettes.’

  ‘They’re not Smokey anything!’ protested Juliet. ‘They’re The Natural Fringe.’

  The band played the same refracted songs they had performed with Mary, only now they were about absence instead of expansion. The audience loved it but Juliet couldn’t stand it. When they came off stage and wandered over to the bar, she went up to introduce herself.

  The guitarist was pleased. ‘We miss Mary.’

  ‘Has she left the band?’

  ‘Well, after the business of Tony –’

  ‘Tobias.’

  ‘Sorry, yes, Toby, terrible business. Anyway, she said it was too hard, what with the little girl and being on her own.’

  Juliet felt terrible. ‘Did you try to persuade her?’

  ‘She moved, didn’t she?’

  ‘Yes, but I can give you her number. You’ll get in touch?’
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br />   ‘Sure, maybe.’

  When they left, Juliet and Theo bumped into Merle and Rogen Dix coming out of a restaurant.

  Merle greeted her avidly: ‘Juliet! I didn’t recognise you. How’s Jacob? I was so sorry to hear.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘His mother?’

  ‘Oh. Yes. He’s fine, actually.’

  Theo was right beside her. She ought to say something but couldn’t think what and so said goodnight and got onto her bike and set off so fast that he had no choice but to nod apologetically and hurry after her. They swooped through the dark, back under the leaves, their lamps skimming over a nocturnal world they could only imagine from its sounds of call and fright.

  At the house they got into bed, and hesitated.

  ‘Who’s Jacob?’

  ‘The one who lived here. Jacob Dart.’

  ‘Foucault’s Egg?’

  ‘Have you read it?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘So where is he?’

  ‘London, I think.’

  ‘How old is he anyway?’

  ‘About twice your age.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Maybe. He makes me feel twice mine. And what about you?’

  ‘She’s gone, too.’

  ‘Where?’ Not who.

  ‘London.’

  Both were amused by this.

  ‘So we’re safe for now.’

  ‘We are.’

  They kissed and slept well.

  At six, Carlo turned off the alarm. He drove across town, stopping for coffee which he sipped and spilt as he swung the car through the already sunny streets, enjoying the fact that he knew this route so well. He opened the sunroof and turned up the radio when a track came on that he had been dancing to a few nights before. He sang along as he jumped a red light and wiggled his hips as he waited for a lorry to back out, and then accelerated into the pleasingly empty road, turned a corner and slammed on his brakes because here was a zebra crossing and a woman waiting with a pram. She smiled at Carlo as he gestured for her to go ahead and he smiled back just as another driver came round the corner behind him as fast as he had, with the same confidence and in the same mood, and hit his brakes but not as quickly, or maybe the brakes weren’t as good, and although his car slowed it did not stop until it hit Carlo’s, not hard but forcefully enough to propel it forward and into the woman and her pram.

  By the time the ambulance came, Carlo knew everything was going to be alright. The woman could not get up, her thighbone was broken, but he had brought her the baby, who had been spilt from the pram and was bruised and screaming but otherwise fine. She stared at it and stared at him, as the other driver sat on the kerb with his head in his hands and the police surrounded them all, asking questions nobody could answer.

  After the police reports and the hospital (not, thank god, his hospital), Carlo called in and explained, and then went home. Jonathan was in the bath, singing. Carlo walked in, took off his clothes and joined him and Jonathan stopped singing and washed his lover’s body, wrapped him in a towel and took him to bed. Carlo endured all this tenderness, but knew he was doing so for the last time.

  The driver who had crashed into the back of Carlo’s car spent the rest of the day in a pub. When the barman refused to serve him any more, he tottered outside, gained momentum and stepped into the street. With the next step, his foot wavered, his body sank and he rolled into the path of a car which veered round him and into a set of traffic lights.

  It was an everyday ballet of the near miss, in which the smallest adjustment to position or timing might turn a casual encounter into one that changes lives. The sequence leading up to such events is so intricate and casual, who is to say where fault lies?

  On this early summer evening, one man stood and shouted at another who lay in the street wondering if he was dying and wanting to sleep. At least someone was turning the lights out, he thought, as the buckled traffic lights fizzed. There was a pause, just long enough for anyone who was watching to understand how one thing led to another, before the other lights at the junction went out too; a further pause and the streetlights dissolved; a slight delay, and the windows above them emptied of their full white, the deeper yellow and then the flat green light within.

  This ought to have been a local affair, a power cut in a sub-section of the London grid, but within that area was Paddington Station where Alexander Strachan was expecting to arrive on a train that had left Cornwall eight hours earlier.

  Two weeks after visiting Botolph Square, he had phoned Mary at the bookshop. ‘I expect my note didn’t impress you much.’

  ‘What note?’

  ‘The one I put through the door at your house. Your gardener said it would be alright.’

  ‘My what?’

  ‘The bald boy with the hair.’

  ‘I didn’t get a note, but thank you for going to such trouble to get in touch and I’m sorry about dinner. I got stuck.’

  ‘Can we try again?’

  Alexander was so glad that she said yes that he wanted to see her as soon as possible, which meant the evening he got back from Cornwall. His train was due in at seven o’clock and he would have been at the pub by eight, only the train ahead of them hit a cow just outside Truro and there was some confusion over a red signal at Bristol, after which the driver had to make an emergency stop and the woman sitting opposite Alexander scalded herself with her tea. He fetched ice from the buffet car and they got chatting. She was American, an historian at a college called Littlefield, which he had heard of and knew to be good.

  She wondered about the cow. ‘It took them over an hour to move it.’

  ‘We like to do these things properly,’ he said, and she had laughed prettily and dabbed at her slender, angry wrist until he offered to go back to the buffet and get more ice and while he was there, something to drink.

  While Mary waited in a bar in Camden Town, the train drew into Paddington two hours late, just as the power cut wiped all the electronic information boards clean. There were no times, platform numbers or destinations. People gathered around a car parked on the concourse, engine running and headlamps on, in front of which stood a station-master holding a torch and reciting timetables from a thick book.

  Alexander helped the American with her bags and thought for a moment to ask for something – what? A number. Why? She appeared to expect him to say something of this kind and when he didn’t, shook his hand and walked off into the dark. She turned and waved or maybe blew him a kiss, Alexander could not quite make it out, and he was relieved but also knew that there would be times, years hence, when he would be stirred into sleeplessness by the memory of the American blonde he had met on a train on the night of the Paddington power cut.

  Mary waited, determined to believe that this time they would meet. And Alexander would have made it if his taxi had not sat in the still coagulating traffic until he thought surely she’d have given up by now, and there was nothing for it but to walk his way out of the gridlocked streets and into a part of town where things still worked and moved.

  On her last evening in Littlefield, Terence asked Juliet to go for a drink. She insisted they go to the sports bar, ‘It’s what we do,’ she said, and ordered White Russians, even though it was only five o’clock and so hot. ‘It’s what we drink.’

  Terence drew on his cigarette. ‘Where are you going to live?’

  ‘I’ll stay with my brother for a bit. He’s got this huge house.’

  ‘Room for Jacob?’

  ‘Jacob? I shouldn’t think so.’

  ‘You sound cross.’

  ‘I know his mother died but I’ve no idea where he is. It’s as if he’s fallen off the edge of the world.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s what it feels like to him.’

  ‘If that were the case then he’d need me, wouldn’t he? He’d get in touch.’

  ‘Perhaps he wants you to go and find him. After all, he came to find you.’

  �
��You never go back to England, do you?’

  ‘Never.’

  Terence had exchanged his flannel shirts for cream linen. His cufflinks were gobs of silver and his houndstooth jacket was lined with silver silk. The shaved hair at his temples was greying elegantly.

  ‘You look older than you are; it suits you.’

  ‘You look older too.’

  ‘I’m waiting for you to add that it suits me.’

  Terence shrugged: Jacob’s sidestep. Juliet was provoked. ‘Well I can’t be ageing that badly, I’ve got a younger man.’

  ‘Another man?’

  ‘No, a younger man. Theo Dorne. You know him?’

  ‘A little. Isn’t he working on the emergence of empiricism? Seeing is believing?’

  ‘He is certainly straightforward.’

  ‘What about Jacob?’

  ‘I offered to go with him to London and he said no. Then he called to say that he wasn’t coming back.’

  ‘He ended things?’

  ‘He said he wasn’t coming back.’

  ‘But why should he? You’re about to go back too.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  Terence spent a long time grinding out his cigarette. ‘Another drink?’

  When Juliet got home, she went through a heap of paper and found some of Jacob’s notes for his new book. This one of Jacob’s voices made her restless. She could not follow a sentence or scan a line, so shut her eyes, opened it at random, and put a finger down: ‘The bridge is a means, a way. It is not a place and so when we stand on a bridge, we do not inhabit, we do not have a place to stand.’ Too charming.

  It was only nine o’clock. Jacob would have taken hold of these hours and would have marked them. They would have lain together in a cool bath or walked out to find the moon, which at this time of year was as orange as an evening sun and twice as large. They would watch for the mother raccoon and her baby who emerged from the trees to pick over the bottles and packages in the recycling bin. Jacob would make lemonade or margaritas, and would arrange something unusual – smoked macadamias, caper-berries, sugared almonds – on one of the pretty, chipped plates he had bought on the way to Vermont. But the pleasure of such things was in their arrangement and Jacob had always looked a little disappointed by the unobservant way in which she ate.