by A. S. Byatt
She put veal and peas together into the oven to warm and brought out the avocado cocktails; she still found herself cooking carefully ‘for’ Simon, who seemed to pay no attention to what was put in front of him. Deborah had laid a pile of cutlery haphazardly on the coffee table – they ate on their knees – and was sitting down again.
‘Oh, it’s all quite a business, it takes a long time,’ said Simon to Deborah.
‘Well, go on, tell.’
‘I don’t think,’ said Julia, ‘we’ll wait for Thor, we never know when he’s coming these days.’
‘I thought he was in the relief centre,’ said Simon. ‘Perhaps we ought to wait.’
‘He might not come at all,’ said Deborah. ‘He’s been known not to. He’s doing too much. Do go on, Simon.’
Mrs Baker, carrying a plate piled high with smoke-smelling fritters passed, puffing and muttering, behind Simon’s chair.
‘They examine the contents of my gut, that’s the essence of it,’ said Simon. ‘There are various parasites and things I might have picked up.’
‘How do they do that?’ said Deborah.
Julia, since she seemed to be the only one interested in the meal, took a spoonful of avocado. Its creaminess consoled her: she did not want to hear about Simon’s gut.
The front door banged.
‘That’s him!’ said Simon. He seemed pleased.
Thor took a long time to come in, and then stood, just inside the doorway, sagging slightly, his winged, staring look accentuated. He brought with him cold air and a tension of some kind. Julia gathered herself.
‘You nearly missed dinner.’
‘You look exhausted,’ said Simon, clinically.
‘I must change my trousers.’
‘Have your dinner first, won’t you?’
‘Someone’s been sick on them.’ Julia took a quick look and saw that somebody, fairly recently, had indeed been sick on them, across both knees and down the left leg. More dirt, more smells, Julia thought as he crossed into the bedroom; lately he had been coming home smelling of all sorts of things; stale beer, rough pipe tobacco, disinfectant and on several occasions the really foul decaying animal odour she associated with rotting upholstery. She dipped her spoon into the avocado again and took several mouthfuls; so, absently, did Simon. Mrs Baker crossed and recrossed with Julia’s Finnish peasant tureen full of disintegrating cauliflower.
Thor came out of the bedroom in a pair of jeans and his cream-coloured heavy sweater. He sat down on the spare bed and pushed his hands over his head, kneading his scalp.
‘Who was sick, Daddy?’
‘Have some avocado.’
‘In a moment, Julia. In a moment.’ He said. ‘I miscalculated. I think it was only to be expected, but I —’
‘Was it one of your suicides?’ asked Deborah, knowledgeably.
Thor nodded. His fingers worked. ‘It was the fourth attempt. I miscalculated. Three – the others – they were no good, they were never meant to be any good, they were only for the attention’s sake. And it wasn’t as though … that is … she would ring me up, and threaten, oh, innumerable times things that never happened. At first I always went, to listen. Later, well, one grows to feel one is doing more harm than good – setting up a habit, that is, she depends on an interest captured by threats – I felt – that was – no good to anyone. No good. No good depending on me. One feels one should listen and care, or not listen at all. That’s a luxury, too, feeling that …’
‘Is she dead?’ said Simon.
‘No, no. Not yet, at least. I used emetics. She has a chance.’
‘You did your best,’ said Simon.
‘Not a good best.’ He looked stricken; Deborah poured him a glass of tonic water.
‘Why did she, Daddy?’
‘This time,’ he said, slowly, cradling his head in his hands, ‘she left a long letter – a long letter – saying it was because I would not come.’ He shuddered. ‘A sickening letter,’ he said, surprisingly, in his toneless voice, ‘a most unpleasant letter. But she had certainly taken enough to kill herself. The letter, that is, was not simply a – an appeal. It was to make me sorry.’
‘They always are,’ said Simon.
‘Well, I am sorry.’ He screwed up his smooth face, and said, to Simon, ‘These are the sicknesses of this – civilization – you won’t have. She must have been nearly fifty – sold lace collars, she said – always dressed, when I saw her, like a – like a whore.’ He gestured grimly at Julia. ‘Emerald eyelids like croquet-hoops,’ he said, ‘and a wet scarlet mouth. Scarlet nails, jagged at the tops. Very tight black dresses, shoes with spikes, varicose veins, smelled sweet and rich and stuffy. Lived in a bedsitter with an electric ring. No relations. Had some anatomical defect she couldn’t bring herself to tell me of, but she knew she wasn’t “normal”. I couldn’t get her to the doctor. She only told me this after the last bid. She’d known she wasn’t “normal” since she was ten. “I’ve lived with it all these years,” she said to me. “Lived with what?” I said. “Oh, I couldn’t say,” she said, “only I’m not quite normal,” and she laid her hands – on my knees. You see?’
‘I see,’ said Simon, comfortably. ‘There was little you could do.’
Julia was faintly excited by Thor’s description; like most men, he had never been able to tell her in any detail what anyone looked like, yet here was an appearance that had impressed him to the point of simile.
‘It would be good to think that,’ said Thor, ‘if I could think it. If I could think it. But I have seen too many people tell themselves that. You, for instance.’ He looked at Julia. ‘Or you. Or you. You ought to know about all the misery – all the loneliness … the real suffering …’ He looked at the three of them with flat hostility. ‘Any of you – any of even all you – could go out and relieve some of this, even one night a week.’
Julia felt this as the sort of practical truth that could not in fact be a truth because it seemed so simple and obvious, and clearly did not work in the world.
‘I’d be no good at it,’ she said. ‘That’s the trouble.’ She thought a moment. ‘Most of us’d be no good at it. And the professionals seem to be such weird people.’
‘The maimed helping the maimed,’ said Thor. ‘I’ve thought that often over the last few months. But as for you – with all your friendship and imagination – if you’d been where I’ve been …’
‘I wouldn’t have them any more. The friendship and imagination. They feed on comfort.’
‘This woman,’ said Thor, ‘is comfortable enough.’ He dropped his head completely into his hands. ‘I shall never –I shall never – I shall never like all this bored and empty brooding on imagined slights and fantastic illnesses.’
‘You want,’ said Julia, almost angry, ‘to be able to watch sores disappear after shots in the arm, or blindness lift, or starved limbs round out, you can see that.… And after that, what? What?’
The telephone rang.
‘When you’ve cured it, what?’ said Julia.
Her husband stood up without answering and seemed, for a moment, to steady himself on his legs. Then he went out into the hall.
‘He ought to have been Albert Schweitzer,’ said Julia, furiously, to Simon.
‘I think so, yes.’
‘But you’re not going to tell me that’s any answer, Si?’
‘No. I didn’t think you were looking for an answer.’
‘Well, he is.’
‘You don’t have to make it difficult for him.’
‘I’ve never met such a slippery character as you are, Simon Moffitt,’ said Julia. Thor re-entered the room.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘She is dead.’
Simon said, ‘Have a drink, that’s best.’
Julia imagined, for a flickering moment, the dead woman on a hospital bed, jagged red nails and drooping red mouth, crumpled fifty-year-old flesh. Everybody I know keeps seeing dead people; I always just miss them. ‘You can’t afford to mind, darling.
These things have got to happen. You did your best. You are too thin-skinned.’
‘I really do think you should have a drink,’ said Simon, with a kind of miserable anxiety. ‘Honestly, I think you should.’
‘No,’ said Thor. ‘Thank you.’
He turned his head from side to side, as though he was searching for air; Julia saw that his eyes were full of tears. If he were a child, she thought, I could slap him, and he would break.
‘Why?’ he said. ‘Why?’ He was speaking to Simon. ‘Why must we behave as though only extremity gives meaning to our lives?’
‘Because, often, only extremity does.’
‘She was sure she – was someone – with those pills and that glass in her hand. Wasn’t it so? And I would notice her. Why do you go out where you go?’
Simon did not answer.
Thor said, ‘It’s a bloody lie.’
Julia stood up and walked into the kitchen; she came back with her warmed casserole of veal, and peas, the potatoes, the warmed plates.
‘At least, we might as well eat dinner,’ she said. ‘We’ve got to go on, we’ll be better with food inside us.’
Thor stood up. He had a dazed frown, and no one quite knew in which direction he meant to move; then he crossed to Julia’s dishes, and emptied them out on to the table. ‘I won’t have this, I won’t have this,’ he said; Julia could hear him grinding his teeth. He said, still with a choked reasonableness, to Simon, ‘You see, I wanted to break her neck.’ He gave the standard lamp a violent blow with the side of his hand, and said through its rocking, ‘All I thought was, I want to, I want to finish this whining once and for all …’
‘I can see that,’ said Simon, carefully. Thor hooked his foot under the coffee table and overturned it. ‘It was pointless, you see,’ he said, as though involved in a theological argument, ‘pointless. Like all this.’ He gave the table a violent kick, which drove it into the bed on which Julia and Deborah were sitting; the crashing and splintering sound of this drew out the Bakers, in whose lives violence was the only relief from monotony; silent, watchful, grinning involuntarily, they hovered in the doorway on one side of the flat.
‘It’s all right,’ said Julia to them, ‘go away, will you, please.’
‘No, it is not all right,’ said Thor. He was breathing heavily, but his voice was still cold; he bent, suddenly, gathered up Julia’s smoky tumbler, hurled it at the window, listened to the small glass explosion, trembling slightly, and walked stiffly into the bedroom. Julia followed him; behind her, Simon and Deborah padded as far as the doorway; across the flat, the Bakers edged out into the living-room. Julia, at this stage, was still calm; she thought, since we have all got to settle down again after this, it seems a little unreal to have actually to live through it, and it goes on so. She said:
‘Look, darling, you’ve got all this out of proportion, you’ve got it out of proportion, you can’t go on like this.’
‘What do you know about proportion?’ said Thor. ‘What do you know about anything?’ Each of his careful sentences was followed by another abrupt, muscle-bound, violent movement: this time, he raised his leg and attempted with his foot to shatter Julia’s dressing-table mirror; he did indeed catch it a glancing blow and for a moment was suspended in an absurd hop, his buttocks straining, his white flesh bulging between the tight cuff of his jeans and his socks. Julia gave a snort. He turned on Simon again and repeated, ‘I wanted to break her neck. I knew how to start, I wanted to …’ He turned round again, and with an outstretched arm swept away all Julia’s silver-topped bottles, and little pots of cream, hair-brushes, tissues, false eyelashes curled in their plastic case, tweezers and hairpins, and, for Julia was untidy, little balls of copper hair combed from the brush, round balls of cotton wool stained flesh and grey.
‘What are you doing?’ said Julia.
‘I won’t have it.’ He began, trampling around amongst these objects, to tear out the drawers and pile them on the bed; Julia’s clothes trailed between bed and dressing-table.
‘Leave my things alone.’
‘Your things. Your things. Bloody things. I want to get at my things,’ he said, childishly. He said to Simon, ‘You know, I should never have married.’ He began to shake the wardrobe, which always stuck.
‘No,’ said Simon. ‘Probably not.’ He looked mournfully at the ground. ‘But in our time it seems to be expected of us, by and large.’
Julia flew at her husband, who in the same moment burst open the rocking wardrobe.
‘Will you shut up. What do you keep telling Simon things for? What the hell is the point of telling Simon about whether or not you ought to be married? Look, for God’s sake, we shall all be sorry for this tomorrow. You ought to know better than to keep telling Simon.’
Thor tugged out a Gladstone bag, ripped open the bed, and pulled out his crumpled pyjamas, which he stuffed into the bag.
‘You tell Simon enough,’ he said, as though this were an answer. He piled in electric razor, bedroom slippers and hair-brush.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m going.’
‘Don’t be silly. Don’t be such a fool, you can’t go, that won’t change anything.’
‘I should have gone years ago.’ He shook his foot free of one of Julia’s nightdresses and ran into the bathroom. He came back, carrying his wet pack, thrust that into the bag, turned to Julia and said levelly, ‘All I do is give you something to complain about. All I do. Well it’s not good for you.’ He struggled with the zip and then gathered up the bag and said, ‘But that’s not the point, and I know it. I want to break your neck, too, that’s a fact, and I’m going, before I do.’ He looked absurd, pompous and about sixteen years old. Julia thought, oh God, he will be so ashamed of having said that when he gets back, we shall all suffer for it for weeks. If I could cry, he might get more reasonable. She went up to him and put her arms round his neck; his shame and embarrassment had to be forestalled, somehow.
‘Listen, darling, we can talk about this.’
He shook himself free and gathered up the bag. Then he filled his brief-case almost methodically, with papers which had been removed from his study, and clasped it shut. Then, followed by Deborah, Simon and Julia, now in that order, he hurried out into the hall.
‘Just because you’re overwrought, you don’t have to humiliate me,’ said Julia. Thor unhooked his overcoat and woollen scarf and put these on. It was then that Julia saw that he meant to go. Simon, for some reason, gathered up his own umbrella and brief-case and stood, dangling these. Deborah was standing very close to Simon.
‘Well,’ Thor said, opening the door. ‘Well —’ He nodded his pale head in their general direction, went out on to the landing, and closed the door behind him. For a few moments, they all stood, listening to his footsteps, running but unhurried, down the stairs.
Julia had a large audience for her reaction to her husband’s departure. She turned and stared back at them all; Simon and Deborah; the draggled row of Bakers, black eyes and yellow faces, mute, patient, somehow greedy.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’d better at least clear this mess up.’ She spread a newspaper on the carpet and began to pick up shreds of veal, peas, slivers of broken glass.
‘I hope it isn’t along of us,’ Mrs Baker offered.
‘No, no. It’s nothing.’
‘I don’t think it’s nothing,’ said Deborah.
Julia glanced at her with loathing.
‘I think we’d better push off tomorrow,’ Mr Baker said lugubriously.
‘Don’t be silly. It’s nothing to do with you.’
Mrs Baker looked offended. Simon, incredibly, was struggling into his raincoat, in which he had entangled his umbrella.
‘Simon!’ said Julia. ‘Please stay here. Please don’t go.’
‘I ought to be —’
‘You can’t, Si —’
‘You have a good cry, that’s right,’ said Mrs Baker. ‘It’ll do you good.’
‘Don’t
go yet, Simon,’ said Deborah. Simon executed a complicated reversed loop with arms and raincoat, and stood, clutching to his breast a bundle of both objects. Julia threw a whole plate on to her newspaper, where it broke. Her fingers were slippery with gravy, and she had a narrow cut, from the glass, on one of them.
‘I wish you’d go away,’ she said, curtly, to the Bakers. ‘We’ll sort it all out tomorrow.’
Mrs Baker shepherded them all, with deliberation, into their own quarters; Simon sat down, nursing his equipment, on the edge of the couch. Deborah sat down next to him. Julia went and emptied the nappies out into the sink. Then she brought back the nappy bucket and began to pile her newspaper pickings into it. She did not look at Simon; she wanted him; for one wild moment she had seen the door closing behind her husband as a door closing her in with Simon.
‘I wish,’ she said, ‘I could just get up and leave all this. Just go.’
‘Simon,’ said Deborah, ‘will he come back?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’
‘How will he be able to stay away? He believes in being normal. Having roots. He can’t just go.’
‘He wants to be good,’ said Simon. ‘But I think he may settle for doing good, now.’ He twisted his umbrella. ‘He’s an immoderate man brought up in a tradition of moderation. So he was immoderate about that too. A naturally violent man, a fanatic, trying to be a reasonable pacifist.’