An Irresponsible Age

by Lavinia Greenlaw

  ‘You’re the same colour as the old sofa from Khyber Road,’ he said, leaning over to kiss her forehead.

  She pushed him away. ‘This is not a coffin.’

  ‘I know that. I don’t kiss corpses.’

  ‘Whose was the most beautiful body you’ve ever cut up?’

  ‘And I don’t tell stories.’

  ‘You used to.’

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Empty.’

  Carlo laughed.

  ‘It wasn’t a joke. Now tell me what’s happened to the angel Jonathan. We don’t hear about him any more.’

  ‘We split up.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I couldn’t do it. I mean I couldn’t be it.’

  ‘It wasn’t what you wanted?’

  ‘It was everything.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  Francesca Clough had gone to the hospital every day and stayed on when Juliet came back to Botolph Square. She slept on the floor in the next room, helped her daughter to wash and took her to the lavatory. When Juliet could do these things for herself, Francesca went back to Salisbury.

  Juliet began to want things like buttered toast, chocolate and cheese, only nothing tasted right. Her mouth was dry, her tongue carried the taste of iron and her stomach was inflamed. She took painkillers and antibiotics, and found it hard to have any sense of recovery – they had already told her that there was another operation to come.

  On what was to be the last day of summer, she sat in the garden relishing the chill and pulling her quilt around her. This time last year she had arrived in Littlefield. She could remember. its weather, buildings and trees but not much human detail. She saw London in those terms, too, or had done when she had been light and quick and able to keep moving through it. Now she walked slowly and had time to look at people, and they took their time looking at her.

  ‘Why do people assume that if you have any sort of physical difficulty, you must be mad?’ she asked Caroline one day when she returned from the corner shop.

  ‘You do look a bit like a, what are they called, those people who’ve been taken over, who have no mind and just sort of clunk about …’

  ‘A zombie?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  The first time Jacob came to see her at the hospital, they had not known what to say to one another and so he read to her. He came to the house and read there too, and she would fall asleep or pretend to.

  He arrived one morning as she was about to go to the hospital, and she opened the door and continued past him into the street.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m on my way to the hospital for a check-up.’

  ‘You’re walking?’

  She looked like paper.

  ‘It’s only ten minutes away. I should try.’

  ‘I’ll walk with you.’

  He took her arm and they set off at a formal pace, stopping now and then as Juliet hesitated. She was not in pain, which led her towards a new kind of discomfort, that of being too light: she felt like nothing and couldn’t understand how nothing could be made to move along the street.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, holding Jacob’s arm tightly.

  She talked on, about the doctors and nurses, the drugs and machines and ward routine.

  When they reached the corner by the hospital, Jacob slipped his arm free. ‘Goodbye, sweetheart.’

  ‘You’re not coming with me? You said you were coming with me.’

  He didn’t want to think about what had been growing inside her or what was gone; nor about the people who were in charge of her now.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ he said, kissing her on the cheek. ‘They’ll look after you. They know how.’

  ‘Coward,’ she whispered.

  He nodded; he had to agree.

  As he turned to leave, Juliet grabbed his collar and with surprising force turned him back to face her. He looked down at her shaky fists.

  ‘You are not exempt,’ she said, remembering Fred’s word.

  Jacob shrugged and she let go.

  Alexander Strachan lived in the far south-west of the city and worked for a firm of solicitors in Holborn. He avoided going home, at least at the same time as everyone else, and liked to walk through the less obvious streets of Covent Garden and Seven Dials, behind the theatres and the opera house where there were no coach parties or mime artists, just narrow houses where bars and restaurants eked themselves out over several tiny floors. Alexander strode through unlit alleyways, past overflowing dumpsters, phone boxes wallpapered with prostitutes’ cards, puddles of fermenting vomit. He was used to the movement in shadows and doorways, the destroyed young who found their way, more and more of them, onto the streets and passed the time half awake or half asleep. Like many who lived in the city, Alexander was neither intimidated nor upset. He confused familiarity with being immune, and being immune with not being culpable.

  It was raining, and for all Alexander’s ideas of solitude, these streets were busy. Other people left work late and did not want to go home. He was not in a hurry and let himself be slowed or redirected by a couple opening an umbrella, or a procession of office workers emerging from a door.

  It was eight o’clock and growing dim, mid-September. Some of those who passed by felt, as did Alexander, a loss of pressure: another meaningless summer was over.

  A stiff man walked an old dog in a tartan coat. A mother wrapped her child in her jacket and lifted it up in her bare arms. A security guard pretended not to notice the teenagers who had moved their sleeping bags and flattened boxes beneath the roof of his hotel. A boy stopped to help someone unfolding a map. An elderly man pondered the last bunch of roses in a bucket at a florist’s stall and a young man leant over to push his girl’s wet hair out of her eyes as they went in through a door.

  Alexander saw all this as he looked ahead up a rising, dingy street at the top of which he saw a pale face in a bundle of black and something in the walk, headlong and tremulous, that reminded him of Mary George; no, not reminded him – it was her, he was sure. To have met her by chance twice! If it didn’t mean anything, he had to make it do so.

  Caught up in this vision, he set off after her, forgetting that nothing had passed between them since he had been too late to meet her in the Camden Town bar; but that had been through no fault of his own. He ran along the slick pavement, reached the top of the road and thought to call out because there she was ahead, and then thought not to. He hurried after her again, dodging umbrellas and people who stopped for no good reason other than that they had seen something interesting or had reached a destination.

  He followed her into a sidestreet, and hesitated. She might not want to see him; after all, she had not been in touch. So he watched her instead as she slowed down by the glass façade of a bar and seemed about to turn back towards him, but then stepped through the glass and disappeared.

  Alexander made himself smoke a cigarette, and believed that in the time that passed he had considered what to do. He walked down to the bar. When he could not see her, he went in. What would he say? What if she were meeting someone? He took his time moving between the tight-packed tables and the standing throng. He had a glass of wine and smoked another cigarette, all the time looking.

  There was a rasp of feedback through a PA and someone was asking people to step back, which they did and a small stage appeared. A woman jabbed Alexander with her elbow, spilling his wine, and a large man in a steaming pullover blocked his view. When the band were announced, ‘Smokey Vanilla and the Pirouettes!’, Alexander thought it best to give up and leave. He recognised her voice as he reached the door.

  Jacob sat in the room at the top of Patrick Hyde’s house and waited. Someone would come. When the family were out, he would go downstairs and take some bread and cheese, and maybe a bottle of beer, and most evenings Patrick came up to urge him to join them for supper, which he always refused. Patrick took to leaving a tray and a bottle of wine outside his door, all of which was gone by the morning.

  Patri
ck loved his friend and knew him well. He phoned Barbara.

  ‘It’s his version of protest,’ Barbara said.

  ‘What’s he protesting about?’

  ‘He thinks no one loves him.’

  ‘But everyone loves him!’

  ‘He wants us to prove it to him.’

  ‘He’s going to have to grow up.’

  ‘Jacob?’

  ‘OK, not grow up but at least find somewhere proper to live. My eldest has his eye on that attic room and to be frank, he’s a bit of a black cloud – hard for us all to live under …’

  ‘You’ve been so kind and patient.’

  ‘You don’t have to flatter me, Jacob ought to be doing that.’

  ‘But I’m grateful, truly …’

  ‘You are devoted, Barbara darling, but you also have better things to do than act as an ambassador for Jacob Dart.’

  Barbara shrugged. ‘He needs one. Anyway, I have a solution.’

  The next Friday night, Barbara collected Jacob and his bags from Chacony Villas and drove him out of town.

  Juliet sat in the basement library of the Institute trying to decipher a Latin inscription on a seventeenth-century engraving of Vanity, who was depicted as a woman holding a hand mirror and paying no attention to the little dog, Fidelity, slipping from her lap. The animal was dissolving into the jagged, fussy folds of her skirts. It was a fading emblem which Juliet once believed had disappeared completely, but now glimpsed everywhere: sleeping in corners, crouching under tables, this creature haunted the emptiest pictures.

  Every observation that occurred to her now was like a loose thread in her thesis waiting to be pulled. She had told her supervisor that it was as if someone else had written all those words and he said something encouraging about her gaining an objective perspective, and that she ought to stick to the position she had spent so long establishing and see her argument through.

  Juliet didn’t want to. The woolly autumn atmosphere was making her sleepy, so she left the library and went up into the courtyard where the tax inspectors whose offices filled the largest wing of this once grand house smoked and parked their cars. It was raining, so she stood under a colonnade and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Juliet?’ It was Theo. He stepped out of the rain and opened his arms.

  Their embrace was not quite that of lovers, and involved some awkwardness.

  ‘This doesn’t happen,’ said Juliet. ‘I don’t bump into people. Other people do, all the time, but I don’t. It doesn’t happen.’

  ‘It hasn’t,’ he admitted with a powerful smile. ‘I came here to find you. I went to the postgraduate secretary’s office, she told me who your supervisor was and he said he had just seen you in the library. So.’

  ‘When did you arrive?’

  ‘A couple of weeks ago.’

  ‘Oh.’ Perhaps he had called at the house when she had been sleeping; or phoned and someone forgot to give her the message.

  ‘Melissa came to settle me in, then went back.’

  ‘The one who came to London?’

  ‘Yes, but just for a month or so. We spent the rest of the summer on the beach and now it’s time to work.’

  Juliet suggested that they find a cup of tea.

  Theo noticed that she walked slowly, and that she looked thin.

  ‘Are you sick?’ he asked as they sat down.

  ‘I was,’ she said. ‘When you met me, didn’t I seem a bit strange? I was not myself.’

  He could not remember her body, just what it felt like to be touching her and inside her. ‘Strange? In a way. Intriguing …’

  She told him concisely about her condition, the pills, the investigations, her collapse. ‘And there’s more to come,’ she concluded.

  He stood up, drew her out of her chair and entirely held her.

  Theo Dorne enjoyed the rain that came to London that autumn. It kept him indoors, with his head bent over a book, sometimes with a magnifying glass in his hand. He liked stepping out at the end of the day into damp and darkness; he was not someone to be so easily brought down. He got out of bed when he woke up, started work when he intended to, and swam each day in the university’s neglected basement pool.

  He and Juliet had exchanged numbers as he waited with her for her bus and she had phoned the next day to invite him to Botolph Square.

  ‘We have a proper dining table now,’ she explained, ‘and so we’re going to have a proper dinner.’

  ‘Christ,’ said the boy who answered the door. ‘You look like you just stepped out of the sea.’

  ‘The Atlantic,’ said Theo, and introduced himself.

  The boy reacted as if this was the funniest thing he had ever heard and ushered Theo in.

  A big American in a big American jacket, was how Fred described Theo to Carlo later. He hopped about, taking Theo’s wet things and arranging them on a radiator, then rushed off with the two bottles of very good wine Theo handed over, saying something about towels.

  Theo turned right into the nearest room, where a small woman was sitting in an armchair with a large child on her knee.

  ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘A real fire!’

  ‘The one in Khyber didn’t have flames, only smoke,’ said the child, slithering to the floor from where she looked up fiercely.

  ‘I’m Mary,’ said the woman, rising.

  ‘Theo.’

  They sat down and smiled at each other.

  After a while, Mary asked, ‘Has Fred offered you a drink? No? I’ll just go and see what’s happening …’ her voice trailed off as she hurried from the room.

  ‘So!’ Theo addressed the child, clapping his hands together enthusiastically.

  She shook her head. ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘oh no, oh no.’

  Mary did not come back. Instead, a blonde woman with a vibrant tan appeared, carrying a tray of bottles and glasses.

  ‘I’m Caroline, you must be Theo. Juliet’s in the kitchen, refusing help. Did you meet Mary? Where’s Fred got to? Bella, don’t do that!’

  She poured several drinks, handed one to Theo and quizzed him energetically about his first impressions of London.

  Fred arrived with the towels. ‘You can mop yourself with these, and do give me those boots. I’ll stuff them with newspaper and give them a chance to dry. Has someone given you a drink?’

  ‘Perhaps he’d like to tidy up in the bathroom, darling,’ said Caroline. ‘And you could lend him some dry socks.’ Theo looked from her to Fred to the child on the floor.

  Mary reappeared. ‘Bedtime, Bella.’

  ‘Oh no!’

  ‘Oh yes!’ said Caroline, and Bella got up to go.

  ‘She’s delightful,’ said Theo, ‘a real force.’

  ‘Who, Mary?’ said Caroline.

  ‘Not your au pair, your little girl.’

  Fred and Caroline beamed, and neither rushed to explain.

  The doorbell rang and this time Caroline went to answer it. She brought in a tall fair man in a suit, who presented her with a bunch of flowers and shook Theo’s hand. ‘Strachan,’ he said, ‘Alexander Strachan.’ At first Theo thought he might be as much as forty but then he saw it was the cut of his clothes, the polish on his shoes, the exactness of his gestures. He appeared to have been untouched by the rain.

  Mary came down and blushed, and Theo watched the man come forward and kiss her with a shy kind of passion. He liked Alexander and Alexander, who looked up and saw the smile on Theo’s face, liked him.

  ‘Can I go say hi to Juliet?’ Theo asked.

  ‘Absolutely!’ said Fred. ‘Along the hall and straight down. She can’t cook, by the way, and she won’t let you help.’

  As Theo reached the kitchen, there was a crash of breaking crockery. He found Juliet in a heap on the floor.

  ‘Are you alright?’

  ‘That fucking child,’ she was saying as he helped her up.

  ‘I thought you’d collapsed again.’

  ‘No, I slipped. On a banana skin.’

  ‘Seriously?’
/>
  ‘My niece is a purist.’

  ‘The little girl upstairs?’

  ‘You met her.’

  ‘And the balding excitable boy, the timid girl, the guy in the suit and the bossy blonde.’

  ‘You met them all.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  As they cleared up the mess and Juliet retrieved what she could of the meal, she explained who everyone was, adding Clara, Carlo, Tobias and her parents to the picture.

  ‘We’re a bit much, aren’t we?’

  ‘Is that the same as being too much?’

  ‘It depends. Too much what?’

  ‘Let’s stop this right now. We need to eat,’ said Theo.

  And so they did, and Juliet discovered what happens when a person who is good and who sees goodness sits down at your table.

  As Barbara pulled up outside the cottage, Jacob got out unprompted to open the gate. He remembered just how to lift it over the stone and how to lift it back. He fetched the spare key from beneath the flowerpot in the porch and opened the front door, and together they carried in all the bags and boxes.

  ‘You’ve changed everything,’ he said and she frowned before he added, ‘I mean you’ve brought out its character.’

  Barbara led him through the sage-green hall, along the newly stained oak floor and into the raspberry coloured living room with its exposed beams and wood-burning stove. He nodded admiringly at the chaise longue and the carved bookcase. In the kitchen he smiled at the pitted table, the narrow bench, the Aga, the chrome fridge and the set of expensive knives. She led him up the mustard stairway and into a bedroom where sparkling white walls surrounded a big brass bed. There was a tall iron candlestick on the floor and the windowsill was lined with old Cornishware of an irretrievable cream and blue.

  Barbara crossed to a door on the far side and lifted the latch. Jacob followed her. He had to bow his head as he stepped through.

  This room was also blue but navy, dark and compacted like dry powder paint. There was space for a single bed, a chair, a desk and a chest of drawers. Jacob pulled back the heavy red curtains and opened the window. He knew what was out there – a garden, a stone wall, a sweep of grass, the rise and fall of dunes, and the sea.