The pattern curled and spread within the square he’d marked while he kept his face to his work and slowly moved up closer to the house and to me. The breeze would soften and strengthen the ring of his spade and parts of the tune he was humming, something high and ornate I’d heard him singing to himself before.
I began to wonder if he was really still ignoring me, if he wasn’t now simply absorbed in his work, building a poem in the ground. The line of movement rolled from his shoulders to his waist, the round snap of effort following each relaxation in his thighs. I knew how he would feel just by looking. I knew that I knew that and that I kept looking all the same.
He turned the soil and stepped and stepped and turned the soil, rubbed his face along his forearm, sighed, all of him moving for all of the time. If I could I would have stood up and gone, but that way I could only lose. I was very unfamiliar with the rules we were operating under, but I still understood that if I left, that would be that, finished, no more of whatever it was we might be. And I wanted us to be what we might be.
Then again, if I continued to sit and he continued to ignore me, well, he was winning again, wasn’t he? And I would have to be even more defeated, if I wanted us both to win. We were in one of those tiny spaces where time thickens up and waits until what has to be done is done, but hurry in case you still miss it, all the same. No second chances, everything new every game.
I thought about clearing my throat and then didn’t. I wasn’t going to say anything. I was just going to stand and walk a little.
I set myself at the edge of his pattern—if he wanted to ignore me now he would have to dig through my feet. Sure enough, he eased round a curve that should have finished a foot or so behind me. Almost in a golfer’s putting stance, he closed the distance down. I could see how bright and brown the outside air had made his skin, only the pale section unbuttoned at the neck of his shirt showing the way he had been.
He dipped his spade in the thin earth for one more stroke. Now there was no more room. He stopped, straightened his back, stared up at the house, offering me his ferocious profile.
We waited, we thought. Or shuffled mental probabilities in the room left by a lack of appropriate thought.
He lifted his spade and struck it down into the earth so that it could join us in standing independently. As I tried to tell if the action had been angry or simply violent, I was also aware that his arm, in falling to his side, had touched me. Whether this might have been accidental became irrelevant as his elbow raised and nudged me slowly in the ribs. It nudged again and again and again. The shoulder followed, leaning in, until the whole shape of his arm, his side, was leant against me. He let his head slip over and rest, his forehead close to my cheek. I braced one foot behind me against his weight and behind that, his mind and his will.
He felt—if it makes any sense to say so—eloquent. Breathing against me, wordless, fixed, he was clearly and precisely a tired man, a surrender, an irresistible decision, a need, a terrible patience and hurt and a body that keyed out the everlasting perfect fit to mine, hip under hip.
I had the very clear and pleasant sensation of being poured away.
“Will you excuse me please and let me work.”
I think he whispered. I remember feeling the hot, soft words that would have come from whispering.
“No.”
“Will you please move, please.”
“If I move, you’ll fall over.”
“This doesn’t concern me.”
“It concerns me.”
“You don’t know what this means.”
“Neither do you.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I know. You don’t understand either.”
“I know.”
“It’ll be all right, though.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I don’t care.”
IN THE LIVING-ROOM, I stood into him, wire-tight, and his neck bowed under my hand and let me slip in and down between his shirt and the little knuckle vertebrae and the dry, private temperature of his back.
I wanted to tell him first.
“I’m a bad person.”
“No more than I.”
“Yes, more.”
“Don’t say so.”
“It’s true.”
“You have ‘dangerous enthusiasms’—this is your point? I once had a few of my own. I could be too unspecific in my love. Henri would warn me to be more private, but we were only people, love was only love. I would always tell him that I would much rather write one original idea than repeat a very commonplace experience.”
“No, I—”
“Sssh. I didn’t believe me myself. I always wanted more of the crime and less of the written evidence.”
I suppose most kisses are the same—ugly to the observer, a mystifying necessity for those involved. I won’t ask you to observe.
“Don’t ever let me hurt you, Savinien. Even if I ask.”
“Ah.” He smiled into me. “No, I won’t let you do that. But neither will you.”
And then for an indeterminate while we stayed in the room in the big house and were full of finding out.
ARTHUR KNEW. It’s one of those things you feel obliged to lie about, even though you are equally obliged to lie very badly and be found out. Arthur knew anyway.
So now we were doing what everyone else had assumed we were doing a month or so before, maybe even earlier than that. No one was adequately pleased for us or surprised. The general reaction was merely calm.
For my part, I could feel myself smiling too much, disclosing a slight elasticity in my walk. And, of course, I felt very inclined to run a lap of honour and whoop a little bit, sort of celebrate. Almost all that stopped me placing a moderate announcement in my local paper was a sudden inconvenient tenderness and the knowledge that, just like the taste of my mouth, my privacy was no longer only my concern.
“Happy now?” Arthur carefully unloaded a box of flat apple pie pieces into the fridge. I almost thought he was talking to the pie.
“Um?”
“Are we back to normal? Or have we moved on from that? I mean, people will be eating again? Speaking? All that boring old sociable stuff. Home sweet home?”
“I suppose.”
“Good.” He closed the fridge and battered the cake box into a surprisingly small ball before throwing it away. “That’s why I brought the cakes.”
“You don’t mind.”
“I always bring the cakes. If I make ’em, I can take ’em.”
“You don’t mind us being sociable again?”
“Why would I mind people being sociable?”
“I don’t know. It seemed possible.”
Arthur rushed water into the sink and began to bully the washing-up. I seemed to have offended him.
“Arthur?”
“Yes?”
“If you were feeling sociable yourself—”
“I’m a bit tired tonight. Sorry. If you had something in mind. Sorry.”
“Nothing special. I was going to wander up the road, have a drink maybe.”
“Go to the pictures?”
“Maybe.”
“No, I’m knackered. Ask whatshisname.”
“Well, I would, but he might not be good with crowds yet. He’s never been out out, you know? I mean, I’m not sure, it might be fine, but I’m not sure.”
“You could find somewhere quiet—it’s a week night. You shouldn’t have any bother.”
“No, no, it should be fine. Maybe you’ll come next time.” Which is when I remembered the first things to go when you get that one particular kind of friend are all the friends you had instead.
As Arthur said, we shouldn’t have had any bother—out on a quiet weekday night, we should have been fine.
“This is a very lucky man there.”
“Um?”
We were occupying a corner position in a coffee-serving pub with furniture constructed round an instability motif. The chairs and tables were
woven out of thickish wire—not as stupidly thin as old coathanger, but only a little more supportive. The lounge was a quarter full of students, quietly sipping cappuccinos and swaying tensely. I knew how they felt.
“He may know that I’m ugly, but he doesn’t know that he can’t walk.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I could make him find out.”
“Listen, this is not the kind of place you’ve been used to. Wherever you were used to it. No one is looking at you.”
“He is.”
“Well, of course he is, you’ve been growling at him for half an hour. This isn’t necessary. You’re behaving like a thug, for Christ’s sake. If you’re a gentleman, act like one.”
“I’m sorry.” Then he said it again, as if he meant it. “I am sorry. I haven’t been anywhere like this for a long time. A very long time. As I remember, it was always unwise to relax.”
“Nobody’s going to hurt you. No one is here to do anything but sit and have a drink and then go home. This is a quiet place.”
“I would feel happier with an arm.”
“An arm?”
“An arm.”
“Good God, people don’t carry arms any more . . . People don’t carry obvious arms. I mean, things really aren’t like that here. Now and again somebody gets punched, no more than that. Quiet area. You’re feeling a bit paranoid, that’s all, a bit jumpy.”
“There is no one in here, I couldn’t take. You know that?”
“I don’t believe this.”
“No, no. I have no intentions in that direction. This is the man I am, I am showing you the man I am. I know there is no one here faster than I would be. There is no one here I could not halt. Completely. I would rather not look at my life and see only this, but I cannot unknow what I know. With every introduction, I meet a living body and all its possibilities for death, these two things come together like the water and the glass.”
“Do you know how you’d kill me?”
“You misunderstand—”
“No, I don’t. You’re not making a threat and I don’t feel threatened. I just wanted to know. How. How would you?”
“I . . . no. I lied very slightly. There are some people for me where death doesn’t come. You are one of the people.”
“That’s nice.”
“I wish it was. When you walk so easily, you sit with your head back, you stare at the ceiling with your throat so opened, when you . . . there was a point where you lay on your side and your one arm covered nothing but your face and then all these times, all these times I want to give you a defence. You should have a defence.”
“Savinien, I’m choking on defence. Nobody ever touches me.”
“That’s not true.”
“Yes it is. You can threaten me, shout at me, be weird at me and it won’t mean a thing.”
“Why would I?”
“You plural, not you in particular.”
“This is a ridiculous part of your language—to have one word with two such important meanings. It could be so easy to cause offence.”
“No, it’s easier in our language to be very offensive on purpose but hide it away. You plural need never take anything personally. That’s how we are. It’s not how I am. I’d much rather hit you than talk about it.”
“So you have said.”
“Seriously. I am defended, Savinien, in every way you can think. I meant it. In my final year at school—this is what I’m talking about—a note came from the office, I was called out of my class. I knew what had happened from the headmaster’s face, but he sat me down and gave me tea and patted my hand and finally—once I’d had a biscuit—told me there’d been an awful accident. My parents’ car had crashed. Careless driving on an easy road, they can’t have been paying attention. Father was dead and Mother was in a coma. And how did I feel? What did I feel?”
“I don’t know.”
“Of course you don’t, because you’re normal. I was content. Calm. Slightly irritated that I would have to visit my mother now, until she died, but very largely calm. I made my face sad for the headmaster and went back to the class. Chemistry—the Nitrogen Cycle. Mother died that evening and my irritation faded. I remember looking at their picture a few months later—it might as well have been a drawing, an illustration from a book. I have done my best never to think of them again.”
“You were an orphan?”
“It wasn’t a problem. I stayed with my grandparents for a while, turned eighteen, got the insurance money they owed me, moved away. That was that. For the whole of my life that has been that. Nothing more.”
“That’s not true.”
“Well, whatever—you have been warned.”
He nodded very slightly and smiled in to himself.
“I think we are both warned and irresponsible.”
We managed another cup of tea each before the music level in the bar edged up enough to make conversation impossible. Outside a mild evening was waiting for us, bands of pink sky setting off a shine in the tenement walls.
Before we were past the red clay football pitch along the way home we noticed a small crowd, mainly waiting beside a tobacconist’s. Three women stood silently by a dark bar door. It took a while before I could identify a paramedic’s van and then behind it a young man lying in the road, his knees bent up in the air. Men in reflective overalls were assembling a stretcher around the man, who wore a dull jacket with a bright red leather collar.
Savinien walked hard past the thin crowd, didn’t move his head.
“This is a quiet quarter here? Hn?”
“Yes?”
“I admire quietness, it can be very useful. Someone, you saw, had made quiet work of that fellow’s throat.”
“No, I—Oh, yes. It was blood, then.”
“Sometimes I wish I could belong here and then something will happen to make me regret that I already do.”
That night we went to sleep in our separate rooms. Although we might have joined each other tactfully during the night. Although we were free to be quite openly together, for that matter, we stayed apart. No ill feeling was involved, only a peculiar tiredness. I suppose I regret this decision now because it was a kind of waste, but it seemed then our time with each other would be so huge that we could be slow and generous inside it. I’m glad of this, I’m glad I remember us slowly, generously.
For an example.
“It’s too much.”
I like to think of this part sometimes.
“It’s too much.”
Savinien is standing in the completed outline of our new front garden. He is gradually gathering money for plants and household contributions by digging other people’s gardens, mainly by dint of his efforts in ours which are, apart from anything, one huge and remarkably ornate advertisement for his prowess with a shovel. Thin paths of brick, evenly laid, curl symmetrically away from his feet, and the earth rests, stoneless and pacified, ready to be green.
“Too much.”
“What’s the matter?”
He is holding his arms around his ribs and his eyes are over-bright. He smiles at me, peacefully.
“The bird.”
“Where?”
“Exactly here with us, listen.”
A little concentration lets in a bright, baroque warble. Something is practising the best of its evening songs.
Savinien pinches at his eyes and then holds one hand out from his side. I find it completely unoffensive that he assumes I will step forward in order to hold this hand and do nothing to disappoint his expectation.
“It’s very nice, but birds are meant to sing, that’s how you get birdsong.”
“I know. It’s all too good.”
“Hm?”
“That there is this song in the world and all the other songs. They are far more than should be required for their purpose, there is too much delight in them.” He spins round to me very seriously. “I would like to plant my garden now. To begin it.”
“Well, why don�
��t you? Do you have enough for flowers and all that?”
“If you and Arthur persist in taking nothing else from me—”
“Yes, we do refuse, that isn’t an issue any more. Bear in mind we aren’t paying you anything as our official gardener.”
“Then I have enough, at least for a very promising beginning.”
“Well, the place to go is up over the back of the hill.”
“I’ve seen it. I have looked at everything I would choose.”
“And?”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“It would be too beautiful.”
“You big daft bugger.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Plant us a garden. A Paradise Garden for little old us—go on. Except you can miss out the fountains, the Arabs would have too, if they’d lived in sodden bloody Lanarkshire. Plant it.”
“Then I will.”
Soon the long dusk will begin, roaring from either edge of our horizon with a harder and harder blue. Because Arthur is upstairs recording the folk music programme from the radio we are going to go inside soon to the living-room. There we will forget that we have to be wary and listen for Arthur’s movements, for one of Liz’s final, final returns. We will stop having to be anything but us.
With the curtains drawn back and the door unlocked we will court each other patiently, straight in to the skin. We will cling and slip together like fish on the sofa we can no longer pass at other times without sneaking a look. We will be here again, at that first time in again, at that starting of being home and rolling home and finding home again. There is nothing like us, no thing better, not even close. And someone is lifting a cold chisel up to my heart and I do not mind.
BUT WHAT ABOUT the world, what about my work?
Well, they continued very much the same. Or rather, they both got much worse and I cared much less. I began to wonder if contented people were, in fact, any kind of useful addition to society. It seemed that, having become contented on one front, I was quite likely to remain contented on many others. Equally, I never had actually done anything with all my prior discontent. Perhaps this was the still moment fixed at the top of my ascending arc and, in only a little while, my course of action would change completely.
So I Am Glad Page 20