by David Nobbs
He’d have to ring Helen. He really didn’t want to, it would somehow spoil the clarity of the moment when they would meet, but he had to.
In fact the phone call went well.
‘Darling, I’m going to be half an hour late.’
‘No problem.’
Easy-peasy.
Then Philip rang.
‘Just wanted to see if you needed company.’
‘That’s so kind, Philip. Actually … I hope this doesn’t sound awful … but … it’s all been so hectic … I just want to be alone. I need a Greta Garbo day.’
‘I understand.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Absolutely. Well, I’m here if you want me, James.’
‘Thanks.’
Several minutes passed before he could ring off. He couldn’t say, Sorry, Philip, I’m going to be late for my lover.
At last he could put the phone down. It rang again immediately.
‘Just wanted to make sure you’re all right.’
‘That’s so kind, Charles. Where are you?’
‘Trieste. Just flown in from Helsinki. I did the Schumann there last night, told them it was for Deborah.’
‘Thank you. Thank you, Charles. That’s … very touching.’
‘The Finns went wild. I felt very emotional.’
‘Thank you so much, Charles. Look, you’d better ring off. The call must be costing you a fortune.’
What a ridiculous thing to say. Charles was loaded. But he had to get him off the phone. He was going to be so late.
At last Charles rang off.
Thank goodness, he found a taxi almost immediately. He sat in silence. His head was beginning to hurt again. The movement of the cab was bringing back an echo of his queasiness. Thank goodness the driver didn’t speak. He tipped him generously.
‘Oh, thank you, sir.’
‘That’s for not saying a word.’
‘Like that, is it, sir?’
‘Yes. Yes, it is.’
He leant against his car for a moment, letting the sun soak into his soul. As he set off from Ealing towards South Kensington he felt strong enough to switch the radio on.
Within seconds he was angry. Within a minute and a half he was shouting. A Church of England clergyman was describing his anguish over the election of women priests. He was going to have to become a Catholic. Suddenly a wave of anger swept the clouds from James’s head. He glowed in the hot sunshine of conviction. His thoughts had that clarity that’s in the air the morning after the gale has passed.
‘You tight-arsed prick,’ he shouted. ‘Whether global warming is going to destroy our world or not, while your God stands by and watches all his creations crumble, is almost irrelevant, because we’re doomed anyway if we don’t solve the population problem. We’re going to run out of resources sooner or later, and the Catholic Church, my good man, has guilt on its hands. But your little literal self-important conscience cares nothing about all this, cares only about its precious integrity, its puny narrow sexist cleanliness. The world needs inspiration, leadership, generosity. Women, that glorious breed who terrify you so much, can march with you and prove that religion still has a part to play in the salvation of the planet. But it’s written in the good book that they can’t be priests so it must be right, just as the fact that the world was created in six days must be right. I applaud you for knowing better than every scientist and expert in the whole world, you must be a very clever man, but your interpretation of spirituality is contemptible.’
That told him.
Anticlimax followed. He still had a bit of a headache. And he had that disturbing feeling that he would never be able to recall what he had said or say it half as well again. And, although he knew that it would not have been possible for him to say it except to the inside of his car, he felt sad, now that it had come out so well, that it had only been to the inside of his car. It had been utterly pointless. It was the story of his life.
They sat in a shady corner of the pub. Their knees touched. This wasn’t lunch. It was foreplay. All around them upper-middle-class London met, talked, exclaimed, kissed. The sun danced on the scrubbed pine tables. The newspapers were spread around, the pints and the glasses of wine were being sunk, people were reading the papers to see if they were wearing the right things, if they were thinking the right things, if they were in the right pub, if they had chosen the right wine, if they had booked the right place for their holidays, if they were sitting with the right sort of person.
There wasn’t a notice on the door of the pub, saying ‘Beautiful people only’. It wasn’t needed. It was sensed.
James had a distinct love-hate feeling for places like this, but today he felt only love. His anger had been spent on a hapless cleric who didn’t know that he was hapless. Today was the first day of the rest of his life. James Hollinghurst was in love. He had been in love before, and it had faded, but this love would not fade, this love was different.
There were difficulties ahead. But this Sunday he was in a bubble. This Sunday there were no difficulties.
Well, only small ones. The first sip of the Syrah Grenache, for instance. How, after last night, would his body react to the alcohol? To his relief, but also somewhat to his alarm, his body greeted it like an old friend, welcomed it in, and settled down with it for a long meeting.
James chose man food – warm black pudding salad and belly pork. Helen chose woman food – smoked salmon and chicken tagine with couscous. It was as it should be, for they were man and woman.
James caught himself on the verge of saying, ‘This is perfection.’ Luckily, he stopped himself in time. He knew that it was impossible to say, ‘This is perfection,’ without at least a touch of smugness, and that it is never perfect to be smug, so to say, ‘This is perfection,’ is to destroy that perfection instantly. He knew that even to think, ‘This is perfection,’ is to endanger that perfection. He knew that perfection could be sought, anticipated, expected. It could be remembered or forgotten. It could not be experienced. Perfection lived in the past and the future, not in the present.
But this day, this Sunday, to have spoken of perfection, how awful that would have been. Without the death of a good woman, this – if not perfection, this richly enjoyable moment – would not have been possible. A flicker of shame dimmed the sun for just a moment. There was no second ghostly appearance of Deborah, but she was there, she was with James for the rest of the meal, the main course, the coffee, the Armagnac that was the final pre-coital touch.
She was with James as he walked arm in arm with his beloved through the smiling streets around the Old Brompton Road, past the smokers spilling out onto the pavements outside the pubs, past the Labradors waiting patiently for their masters to finish their fourth pints. She was there, in the sunshine, and just for a moment she was the sunshine.
She was with him on the wide steps that led up to Helen’s apartment. The sun, through the stained glass of the double doors, was carpeting the stairs in blue and red. He walked just behind Helen, admiring her small, cheeky, exquisite bottom.
In the richness of his desire James forgot Deborah again, or thought that he did. She was not there as he slowly undressed Helen, kissed her bottom, her thighs, her bush, her breasts. Or was she?
She surely wasn’t with him as he entered Helen, his clean, circumcised prick long and broad and triumphant. Or was she?
He pumped and pushed, Helen began to moan, and then, slowly, like a punctured balloon, like a bubble caught in the hands, he felt the stiffness go out of him. He pumped harder, but now his penis was a sorry, shameful thing, he could hardly feel it, he couldn’t feel it at all, it was almost as if it had fallen off, was that possible?
It was a horrid feeling, pulling that flaccid thing out of her, like a stillborn baby. He shuddered in horror at himself and his unwelcome thoughts.
They lay side by side, touching each other, a million miles away from each other.
He said that word that he’d had to say so often l
ately but never before in his life under these circumstances. ‘Sorry.’ He smiled wryly deep inside his unsmiling self. He was beginning to think that it was his word of the week.
‘Sorry,’ he said again. ‘That’s the first time that’s ever happened to me.’
‘There’s a first time for everything,’ she said, trying but not quite succeeding to make a little joke of it.
He thought of saying, ‘I had a lot to drink last night,’ but that might have led her to think that he should have prepared for this great day less carelessly, so instead he said, ‘I’ve had a very demanding and exhausting week.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, telling the same lie that a million women had told before. Well, probably it wasn’t entirely a lie. It mattered and it didn’t matter. It might turn out to matter and it might not. ‘Perhaps we could try again later.’
He didn’t reply. He knew that they couldn’t. Not today, anyway. Besides, he shrank from that word – ‘try’. He had never had to try.
He had his third shower of the day. What a week it was also turning out to be for showers.
They were fully dressed again, standing in her coolly contemporary minimalist living room, with its stylish Scandinavian furniture and fittings. It was the first day of the rest of their lives. It was the first day in which he hadn’t got another woman to scurry home towards. It was twenty-seven minutes past three. He couldn’t leave early, now that he didn’t have to. Goddamn it, he almost wished he did have to.
‘What do you fancy doing?’ she asked.
Sad words. Sad words.
‘I don’t know.’
An even sadder reply.
‘Do you fancy a walk?’
‘I really don’t. It’s so hot.’
It wasn’t just the heat. It was the image. The Sunday afternoon stroll. The whole family, or just the happy couple, out on their post-prandial but not post-coital walk. On Christmas Day they’d be wearing their new scarves, but at any time of the year they’d look like the people in adverts for mortgages.
The afternoon hung before them as if this was a hospital visit. Neither could admit the desperation of this moment.
‘We could always …’ her words almost refused to come, she couldn’t look him in the eyes, ‘… play Scrabble.’
From sex to Scrabble in twenty agonising minutes. Well, why not? It would pass the time.
It would pass the time! Was that what their great day had come to?
‘OK.’
‘Red or white?’
‘Have you got white chilled?’
‘Do you really think you need to ask me that?’
They decided to play in the communal gardens. That was good, because the little expedition took some time to organise – folding table, folding chairs, bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon, wine chiller, glasses, parasol. The intrepid travellers braved the long stairs, dark and gloomy now that the sun had moved on – well, now that the apartment block had rotated somewhat. The narrow back door proved no great obstacle to these brave wanderers, and quite soon they had set up their base camp in an unexplored corner of the private gardens.
James felt about sixty-seven.
When one is playing a game of Scrabble one has to be competitive, or there really is no point. James decided to show this whippersnapper how the game should be played. But it was not his day. At one stage he had seven vowels. At another, seven consonants. He had the J, but in the course of the game Helen had the X, the Z, the Q (with a U), both blanks and three of the four Ss.
There came a delicate moment when James could make two very different words. Cunt or aunt. The word ‘cunt’ is a difficult one for the English middle classes, and this was a Sunday, and they were in the private garden of a very respectable apartment block, close to the spot where Kensington met Chelsea.
However, the word is in the dictionary, it is permissible and acceptable, and words in Scrabble have no meaning, no value beyond their score. And the C on a triple letter would score nine.
James decided to forgo the points and settle for ‘aunt’. A decision made in the interests of decency and respectability? No. An avoidance of a word that would lead back to thoughts of what hadn’t been and, today, couldn’t be.
By the time they had finished the game, and the wine, and had made the return expedition to the apartment, it was eleven minutes past six. It was still far too early to depart.
‘I saw a little pub round the corner,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t half fancy a pint. I’ve had enough wine.’
‘OK.’
They sat at the bar counter. Helen had a gin and tonic and made it last, James had two pints of bitter.
‘Shall I make you a bit of supper?’ she suggested.
‘That’d be great.’
They wandered back, arm in arm. He was ready for some more wine now. He really wanted to get roaring drunk, dangerous though that might be. She opened a bottle of red. Fleurie. Light wine for a heavy evening.
She rustled up a bit of supper. Couscous. He’d have bet on that.
‘How are you with beetroot?’ she asked. ‘Love it or hate it?’
‘No, I quite like it.’
Five years of seeing each other, and the beetroot question had never cropped up. He didn’t even know if she was for or against Marmite.
It was an interesting supper. A fiddly supper. A complicated supper. A delicate supper. It was as unlike Deborah’s succulent but straightforward ham and cheese and home-made pâté suppers as could be. It was none the worse for that.
And none the better.
Helen opened another bottle of Fleurie. James had the feeling that today he could have drunk the complete output of a medium-sized vineyard and still remained sober.
He saw Charlotte, saw her as he imagined she might look now, watching him with Helen. The image disturbed him.
It was time he went away, went home, stopped feeling maudlin.
But when Helen refilled his glass he didn’t protest. He just watched the red stream entering his glass, didn’t say a word.
They sat at the window and watched the light fade. They didn’t talk much now, they sat there like a couple who were already married, and he didn’t know whether that was good or bad. He began to want to see her naked again, but he knew that it would be no use. He’d had too much to drink. He didn’t want to hear her say, ‘It doesn’t matter’ again. He didn’t want to have to utter his fiftieth ‘sorry’ of the week.
When the bottle and both their glasses were empty, James pulled himself slowly to his feet.
‘Not putting pressure on,’ said Helen. ‘Honestly not.’
‘But?’
‘But … how long do you think I have to remain hidden away from the rest of your life?’
It was too early to mention his plan, the plan that he had worked out the other night when sleep wouldn’t come. But perhaps he was slightly drunk after all, and he found that he was telling her.
‘I thought we could go on a cruise, in a couple of months, say, because I don’t want to go in August, children and cruises don’t mix except on kid-friendly boats, which we’d both hate. September. Perhaps even a month’s cruise. To really nice places. On a good cruise line. Single-occupancy cabins, but we sleep together from the start. We go back home, and I say to people, “I’ve met someone,” and they say it’s too soon, I’m on the rebound, we shouldn’t flaunt ourselves out of respect, and I say, “But I love her. I’m not hiding her away. And I’m not on the rebound. This is the real thing, and I know Deborah would give it her blessing.” Admit it, darling. It’s not a bad plan.’
‘No, I admit it, it isn’t. But it’s your plan, not our plan.’
‘Come up with a better plan, then. I’ll listen.’
‘There is no better plan, and you know it. But it means that our new life will start with a lie.’
‘I’m afraid we both have to accept that that is inevitable.’
She came down the stairs with him, they held each other tight for almost a whole minu
te.
For the second day running, he had to leave his car and get a taxi home.
Monday
The alarm woke James at half past six. He awoke slowly, and from a long way away. His head was heavy. His sleep had been deep but troubled.
Why had the alarm gone off an hour early? That hour of missed sleep clung to his eyes.
Of course. He’d left his car near Helen’s apartment. He had to pick it up before parking charges became applicable. Eight-thirty, was it? Or eight? He couldn’t remember.
Helen’s apartment. Memories of yesterday flooded back. Sunday with Helen. It had been like sitting on a bouncy ball that had a very slow puncture.
He immersed himself in practicalities with some relief. Very calming, sometimes, practicalities. Shower. Dry. Dress. Breakfast. Coffee. Toast. Three-fruit marmalade on the first half-slice, honey on the second, then spreadable butter only, then medium-cut Seville orange marmalade. Pills. Quinapril, amlodipine and bisoprolol hemifumarate for the blood pressure. Simvastatin for the cholesterol. Cod liver oil with glucosamine for the joints. Nothing for the confusion in his soul, no cure known for that yet.
The soft plop of the newspaper onto the floor of the narrow hall.
Just time for a quick read over the last of the coffee. No point really, never anything worth … what??
‘Two Lincolnshire schoolboys had a surprising shock … [What other kinds of shock are there? Morons!] … when the kite they were flying landed in the waters of the River Ouse yesterday. They found not only their kite, but the dead body of controversial businessman Edward Winterburn (48). It is believed that it had been there for several days.
Mr Winterburn was last seen walking away, on his own, from a private party in Chelsea last Tuesday. The police were alerted, and are known to have dragged several reaches of the Thames in their search for the missing ‘high-flyer’.
A police spokesman said last night, ‘We have no idea how he got to the river or whether he died there. It is too early to rule out foul play.’