So I Am Glad

by A. L. Kennedy

  “No, Savinien. We’re not open, not defenceless, just apathetic—we really don’t care very much.”

  “Speak for your fucking self.” Liz plunged out past me and Arthur made to follow her.

  “Sorry, Art.”

  “This really isn’t the time for one of your bloody debates, you know? That little shite’s taken her money, pulled her in completely and now he’s fucked off. She doesn’t even know where to, so going and cutting his head off or whatever is completely academic.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I should think so.”

  “I had a funny day.”

  “Didn’t we all.”

  “I don’t know—did you have some kind of trick cyclist pedalling by to suggest you should take a holiday if you want to keep your job? Does that happen in the high-pressure world of baking fucking technology?”

  “Congratulations, you have just offended everyone in the room.” Arthur turned away and stared past Savinien.

  I decided I’d better get out. “I’m going to speak to Liz.”

  “Don’t upset her.”

  “I’m not going to upset her, Arthur, why would I upset her? I don’t normally upset anyone.”

  Savinien called from beside the window. “Perhaps, Arthur, you would like to be here and look at the garden with me. I would like to ask you a question about it.”

  I left before Arthur had time to answer.

  Liz was across in her room.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Uh hu.”

  “I am.”

  “Uh hu.”

  I took a seat where she could look up and see me if she wanted to. “I’m a prat. You know that. It’s not my intention. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to help.” She rested as she was, sitting on the empty floor with her back against the stripped bed. The anger had stopped and she was starting down into something more like despair, I could taste it. “I don’t know if Arthur said, we’d never even got round to advertising your room.”

  “Thought I’d need it again, did you?”

  “No. We wanted you to be happy with Sandy.” Wrong thing to say, wrong thing to say, wrong thing to say. I edged myself on to the floor beside her while she sobbed.

  “Oh, God it’s a fuckup. I’ll have to move my stuff back from there and he never paid the rent so that’s got to be done and I . . . I don’t want to do it.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Yes I do.”

  “You don’t now. We’ll help out. It’ll be all right.” She breathed out in a way that disagreed. “Don’t be sad. I hate it when people are sad.”

  “Of course I’m fucking sad.”

  “I know, but, it’ll go and . . . everything gets different, that’s what happens . . . it’s only logical. It’ll go.”

  She rolled round suddenly and cried into my chest, clinging across my arms ferociously. I didn’t want to move in case I gave some kind of signal that it was not fine for her to do this if she wanted, but after a while I was also becoming quite claustrophobic. One of my hands had gone to sleep.

  I tried to think of other things. Of how I might apologise to Arthur, of how I might apologise to Savinien, of how much more time there would be in my life if I did not very often have to apologise. From time to time I wondered if all of that formerly naval brutality hadn’t really been a little distraction from a more consistent cruelty—the kind you will always trawl behind you if you’re used to being permanently calm.

  “Thank you.” She disengaged, sending a violent rush of blood back into my arm.

  “Hm?”

  “Thank you. For being there.”

  And I couldn’t deny that I had been there. Thoughts and feelings all inappropriate, but the body had been there and wearing a suitable face. “That’s fine. Sorry I upset you.”

  “You didn’t, not really. He did that.”

  “Well, fuck him.”

  “Yes. Fuck him. Not that I would.”

  “Absolutely. Would you like to have one of Arthur’s cakes or something?”

  “No.”

  “A cup of tea?”

  “No, really. But go on and have something yourself. Go on. I’ll be fine. Go on.”

  I was trying to go, my legs were simply too stiff to allow me to rush away, but she looked across for me gently, appreciating my concern. So I appeared unwilling to leave her alone, I appeared concerned in the proper way. That was fine. I am always capable of doing the right thing by accident.

  AND THEY ALL forgave me.

  Liz, Arthur, Savinien, they all agreed to have been only a little offended by my social inadequacies and to have then entirely forgotten that offence. What offence? They didn’t know, they’d forgotten.

  For my part, I agreed to be very favourably impressed by the people I shared a house with. Arthur prodded me cheerfully in the arm before he went up to bed and left me with a significant nod towards the living-room door which I then opened.

  “Hi.”

  Savinien was sitting on the sofa—our sofa—bathing in the silent underwater glow of the television. He always preferred to watch like that if he was on his own, enjoying a source of moving light and excluding all possible sound.

  “I said, Hi.”

  I continued to stand, watching the shadows rise and then recede across his shoulders and hair.

  “If you’re not speaking to me, it’s okay. I knew I would upset you eventually—I do most people if they hang around long enough.”

  I felt cold. I wanted not to.

  “Come here.” He didn’t sound upset, only slightly dry.

  “Oh. Okay.” I sat just out of touching distance and watched the faded colours of the late-night news chase each other over my hands.

  “How else might you offend me?”

  “I don’t kno—”

  “How else would you hurt me, with words, what would you say?”

  “I can’t . . . how can I?”

  “You can do me the courtesy of permitting me to ready my defence.”

  “You don’t need a defence against me. I promise.”

  “What would you say?”

  I found that when I reached across he allowed me to take his hand.

  “What would you say?”

  “That you were short.”

  “I am short. This used not to be the case, but now I am, yes, a short man in comparison with others. You’re telling the truth, you’re not hurting me.”

  I wanted to ask him how many times he thought I’d told the truth and managed to get out and away with no harm done.

  “I am short. And?”

  “Well, you’re crazy sometimes.”

  “Yes. And?”

  “Your chin is perhaps small.”

  “Yes.”

  “Your nose isn’t.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re very beautiful. Say yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I love you. Say yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “I love you.”

  “Yes.”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you.”

  I’d been alive for more than thirty years to reach that evening, that room, that hand which was always so solid and taut and clever about the things I liked to feel. Thirty-five years of sleeping, waiting, shuttered months before I could make and feel and mean a sentence about present love. Worth the wait, I think.

  He tucked himself against me and I whispered something— that we shouldn’t be apart again—something like that, while my thought went missing in touching the heat of him through his shirt, in the dusty smell of the day’s sunlight still on his skin, in the taste of his throat.

  I remember that we sat together until we were grazing the edge of sleep and all the time we promised and promised each other impossible things with all our hearts. We used words like forever and never as if they were locks, the secrets we only needed to believe in before we could handcuff the world.

  “Today, I wrote you a thing.”


  “Hm.” I turned my head in closer beside his chin and then realised what he’d said. “You wrote?”

  “Sssh. Yes. It came back.”

  “That’s wonderful.”

  “Maybe it is, I don’t know. Might I give it to you?”

  “Of course, of course.” I had never been written to by a writer, certainly not by my writer. I had never been a part of someone’s work, that very politely closed part of their mind.

  He reached down to his side and brought up a folded sheet of paper. He was writing again, in his old ways again, back to his old self and perhaps more. I was happy for him in a way that I might not have been if he had not been, at least for a little while, writing about me. I had no cause to feel lonely when he drew back into his words because I would be there, too.

  “Here.”

  “Thank you. Really. For thinking of me.”

  “Thank you for reading me.”

  I still have the paper I held then, leaning it into the cool, broadcast light so that I could see.

  Jennifer,

  Y a-t’il sur toy un atome de chair, qui ne soit coupable de ma mort? Parce que je t’aime trop. Je me meurs depuis que je vous ay veuë, je brusle, je tremble, mon poux est déréglé; c’est donc la fièvre? Hélas! c’est ne l’est point. C’est la Mort. C’est l’amour. Brusler d’amour, cette flame si douce, personne n’en est jamais mort.

  And that was as far as I even attempted to read, my focus slipping from line to line to find some understanding of either his words or his intention. I could feel him shift his weight beside me, hopeful, apprehensive.

  “I can’t . . . could you . . . this is.”

  “What’s wrong, Jennifer? I have offended you?”

  “Of course not. Of course not, you couldn’t. I’m sorry, I just . . . this isn’t in a language I can understand.”

  “Oh, but—” He pressed in neat against my shoulder and scanned his own lines. “This is . . . this is very clear . . . I know my meaning absolutely . . . So. I am in all simplicity now writing in my proper tongue. Why? Why now?”

  “I don’t know, love. Tell me what you say. So I know.”

  “Eh, well. I say that I love you.”

  “With all those words, that’s all you say.”

  “You know this is more difficult to speak than to write.”

  “Not if you mean it.”

  He breathed a small laugh and turned himself so that he lay across the sofa with the weight of his head and shoulders across my stomach and my legs. “So now I am here, like the letter. I ask if there is an atom of your flesh I couldn’t die of because I love you so. I have been dying since I saw you first, burning, trembling, my . . . um, perhaps I might say flesh is beyond my government. Fever? Not at all. This is love. This is love. To burn by love, the flame so sweet none ever dies of it.

  “I say you boil in my veins and distil a perfect image of your soul inside my heart. I say all kinds of things. I . . . when I speak of love in my language, I also speak of death because the words sound so much the same—La Mort, L’amour—I mean nothing by it. Except love.”

  He was a rotten liar. I knew the love he meant, the one that included darkness and loving on alone.

  I won’t tell you the rest of his letter because it’s here and it’s mine. If I do not touch the paper often I hope that when I lift it out and warm it there will always be something about it like the scent of him.

  That evening we comforted each other without especially having to say that we needed to. Our minds and selves knew what to do and we looked out from inside them and were brave and sleepy together as hard and as much and as softly as we could.

  In the morning, our garden was broken again. Arthur walked me out of the front door to see Savinien standing in a ragged, Saturday crowd of neighbours who shook their heads, or shouted, or stared back at the shattered stems, the missing bricks, torn earth to see if it really was as bad as they’d remembered.

  I left for work with Arthur still stationed earnestly out on the pavement and talking with a small group of casually familiar faces. Liz was sitting with Savinien in the kitchen. I thought it was nice of her to stay with him, particularly when she was still upset herself, but I also wanted her to leave him the fuck alone. Nothing but jealousy, I knew, so I smiled extremely broadly, patted her, kissed him on the cheek and went away.

  The house I returned to was, even in the late, long summer dusk, still opened to a remarkable stream of volunteers. A succession of ladies Savinien had gardened for brought him plants, scones, advice. Arthur’s bakery boys had been summoned and two of them were still sitting out on the steps and drinking beer. The gentlemen Hell’s Angels from halfway down the street were walking inside, just ahead of me, with carrier bags of privet and Super Lager and not inexpensive white wine. The garden looked raw, but restored, now very obviously the product of several imaginations within one plan.

  “Where’s Savinien?”

  Liz was in the kitchen, hatcheting four loaves of bread.

  “I don’t know. Haven’t seen him for a while. Would you like a mug of wine?”

  I wondered for a moment if she or Arthur had attempted some kind of mulling experiment and then noticed her own tea-cup of cold red wine and realised we’d run out of glasses. We weren’t a household used to impromptu entertaining on any kind of scale.

  “No thanks.”

  “You needn’t worry, he’s fine. We’re all fine. We’ve all had a wonderful day. I’ve never seen so many people be so nice. Mrs. Jenkins or whatever her name is gave us three different loads of scones.”

  “Mrs. Jenkins next door? She’s not even speaking to us.”

  “She wasn’t speaking to you.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Well, she’s speaking to everyone now. I think we’re reminding her of the war.”

  “As long as she’s happy.”

  Upstairs Arthur had obviously moved his stereo near the window. Elvis Costello began to plead and swagger out above our heads and into the old garden at the back. An uneven cheer went up from both sides of the house.

  “I can’t get over it. Everyone’s been so good. They’ve spent all day putting things right.”

  “So now you’re all having a party.”

  “And then watching the match.”

  “Match?”

  “World Cup—you remember, that big ugly gold thing they all kiss at the end of the match.”

  “Oh, right, of course, I’d forgotten.”

  “Any objections?”

  “Oh, no. No. I, ah, it’s great to see you looking so happy.”

  “I am happy.”

  “Me too.”

  Which was true. I’d just told my line manager that I would indeed go on holiday, thank you for suggesting it, and the garden was fine and it seemed we had more friends than we’d imagined. I didn’t know many of them too well myself, but that was only to be expected. For me, it was more than enough that the house had friends and that I was in the house.

  If our position seemed vulnerable to me, if the growing dark concerned me while I wondered if whoever had attacked our garden—Savinien’s garden—intended to do something more, then I didn’t need to mention my thoughts right then and damage the atmosphere.

  “He’s here.” Savinien was near the window in the dark front room.

  “He’s here.”

  “Who?”

  “The man who did this or who had this done.”

  “Well, he can’t do anything now. The house has never been so full. Have you seen him? He’s really here?”

  “You think this is imagination?”

  “No. I wasn’t sure if you were guessing or if you’d actually seen him.”

  “He has shown himself, of course. I have also.”

  He spoke as if he were describing the figures of a dance, an old performance reviving again. “He understands me and I him. I had thought we might leave each other be. Although this is almost always not possible.”

  “It’s this man James?�
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  “Yes. Naturally.”

  He answered from a deep calm I didn’t recognise while his mind’s attention quartered the window, quickened his movements and breath.

  “Why don’t we call the police?”

  “This is not for your police.”

  “I’ll call them.”

  “You will not.” He had stepped to face me before I could realise. There was a strange charge about him, a hard, open distance in his eyes. His cunning was creeping ahead of his intelligence while his thought and will and feeling became muscle. In a few minutes he would be nothing but dangerous. “You would have nothing to tell them and the matter between us would be unsettled, it would go on.” He gave a sudden, empty smile. “Let me protect you.”

  “I can’t stop you.”

  “No, you can’t.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Be your champion and die for you.”

  “Don’t you dare.”

  “I am going to take what action I must and then this will all be done. We will be alone together.” He nuzzled my face and I let our lips meet, so that we finished by tasting each other too deeply for me not to need more. When I did what I must and drew away there was no part of me or my thinking that did not feel pain.

  “Come back.”

  “I promise.”

  “You’d better.”

  “I’ll come back.”

  Someone had brought us candles and while the dark swung in with a fine cloud to keep us warm, small flames began to pipe up outside from beside walls and paving stones and all round the borders of our grass. From inside the house our television leapt alive and opera raced out. Soon millions of people would simultaneously stare at Italy’s team of footballers and Brazil’s team of footballers playing a decidedly uninspiring game of—conveniently enough—football. But first, there would be opera.

  I watched Savinien walk smoothly across the lawn and back inside. I hadn’t seen him come out. I no longer knew about him, except that he would do something soon. Something bad would happen soon. The bad something would step into my life, right past me, and I wouldn’t see.

  In the living-room huddles and couples and solitary shapes found what space they could to watch Pavarotti singing in French with his usual bewildered eyes, as if he were always astonished by the sounds leaping out of his mouth.