As soon as she says his name he says, ‘Elizabeth?’ She’s amazed that anyone could recognise her voice so quickly after one meeting.
‘I want to thank you for the wonderful lilies,’ she says. She hears herself being charming.
‘D’you like them?’ He sounds relieved. ‘They’re my favourites but I thought you might like them too.’
‘I love them,’ she says.
‘A bit like Swan Lake,’ he says, ‘I always think.’
That is such a shock that she is silent and he says again, ‘Elizabeth?’
She says, ‘Yes, I thought that.’
‘Does that mean you’ll have dinner with me?’
A dreadful moment of choice. She thinks, What am I doing? I love Felix, why am I flirting with this young man who has a wife and children and problems of his own, and worst of all is yet another writer, with all the neurosis that goes with the job? Is it just to make Felix jealous? Am I just using this person? I don’t find him particularly interesting or attractive. And how will Felix ever know unless I tell him? But her other self says disgustedly, It’s only dinner, for God’s sake, and you’re not a virgin or a nun. How did sex get into this? she asks the other self.
‘I’d love to,’ she says, as if she’d known all along. They discuss where and when and she writes it all in her diary, marvelling at this efficient social person who is doing all the brisk chat as easily as if it happened all the time, when in reality it is sixteen years since she has had a meal with anyone who wasn’t a friend, a colleague or one of her authors. Apart from Felix, of course. Since she has had a date, in fact. That is what it used to be called, when she was young. The very word makes her smile, it seems so incongruous and oddly American. But what else can she call it? And here she is, at fifty-two, arranging to have one. It seems like an anachronism. Perhaps that’s why it’s called a date, she thinks, because it’s dated. She feels slightly hysterical at the thought but there is no one to share it.
* * *
‘The trouble is,’ David Johnson says over dinner, ‘that Kate wanted me to go on Lithium, but I find it inhibits all creativity, and my doctor agrees with me that I’m not really manic depressive just because I’ve had episodes of depression and episodes of mania. I mean I couldn’t have written the book otherwise, could I? There is a price to be paid for that. But it’s only isolated outbreaks, not a regular pattern, so it’s absurd to treat it with drugs all the time, especially something as powerful as Lithium. I think it’s a real comment on our society that we’re so keen to prescribe mood-altering drugs like Lithium that level you out, and even keener to forbid drugs like cocaine and heroin that give you highs and lows. Huxley was right: we obviously want everyone nicely cheerful and subdued on Soma tablets. Anyway, luckily my doctor saw my point of view, but Kate accused me of having him in my pocket and wanted me to get a second opinion. In other words she wanted me to shop around until I found a doctor who agreed with her. It didn’t seem like a very good way to run a marriage. But I would have hung on indefinitely because I really do believe that marriage is for life and we’ve been together since we were students, quite apart from the fact that I was very involved with the children, having been at home with them a lot when they were small and Kate was teaching, and I do think children need a father as well as a mother, I mean a father who’s really involved. But I was fairly shocked that Kate wanted me subdued in this way, it was almost as if she’d like me castrated or given a pre-frontal lobotomy or put in a straight jacket so I’d be more convenient to live with. Not that I was ill-treating her or anything even when I was at my absolute worst. And the most extraordinary thing was that she came up with all this after the book was published and I’d won the prize and there was some extra money for the very first time so things were really easier. I mean I’d repaid her faith in me and all her patience and hard work and then just when she could relax and enjoy it all she said she wanted a divorce. I’ve never understood that but when I ask her about it she can’t explain, she says she just reached breaking point, but I have a theory that if I hadn’t been successful she’d still be with me, encouraging me to go on, and it’s just the money she doesn’t like, in fact if she was a man and I was a woman it would make perfect sense, it would be the old thing about envy and competition, the classic way marriages break up because it’s too threatening when the woman gets more successful than the man. Only in our case it’s supposed to be the right way round and you’d think that she’d be delighted that the pressure’s finally off and she can relax a bit, I mean what’s it all been for otherwise? I thought that was what it was about and what we were both working for and making all those sacrifices for, but now it’s as if she wants to punish me for succeeding by taking my children away from me unless I take the sort of drugs she wants me to take which mean I won’t be able to write any more. It’s a pretty stark choice. Forgive me, I’m talking too much. Now tell me about you.’
‘There’s not very much to tell,’ Elizabeth says. She points at the food on her plate. ‘This is delicious.’
* * *
He drives her home. She did offer to get a cab but he said he wouldn’t hear of it, a quaint phrase, she thinks. She has made the mistake of letting him call for her at home because it seemed more polite, more traditional, more like an old-fashioned date in fact, and they have travelled to the restaurant in his car. He has drunk very little, so she feels quite safe, but she has drunk quite a lot while she was doing all the listening because it seemed to help her pay attention. She thinks, Well, he needed to talk and it didn’t hurt me to listen. I certainly didn’t want to talk about Felix and if he hadn’t told me his troubles we would only have talked about politics or publishing. There’s still no such thing as a free dinner and maybe that’s the price of dates these days. It used to be sex, welcome or not, and now it’s listening. You open your ears instead of your legs. Or both, perhaps. Does she want to go to bed with David Johnson? She still thinks of him like that, quite formally by both names: he is still the person on his book jacket.
Listening seems a lot more effort than sex and much less fun. Towards the end she felt as if the words she couldn’t absorb were bouncing off her head like hailstones splashing off a full water tank. But she has always found sex easy and pleasant, long before she met Felix, which helped her understand why he wanted to have so much of it with so many people. It didn’t make infidelity any less painful to tolerate, but at least it wasn’t an esoteric interest like train-spotting or stamp-collecting where she couldn’t see the appeal. Felix never talked like that on a date, she remembers. Felix used to make me laugh and ask me questions. Felix used to listen. Felix was actually interested in finding out about me.
David Johnson plays a tape of Miles Davis on his car stereo and hums along with it now and then. She has never heard anyone do that with jazz before and wonders if she dare ask him to stop. She decides against it: she doesn’t want to offend him and if he stops humming he may well start talking about Kate again and she can bear the humming better, at least for the short journey to Putney. Besides, she needs the time to decide if she is going to ask him in. Part of her wants to say goodnight and never see him again; another part very much wants to be unfaithful to Felix as soon as possible to see if she is capable of it. Decisions. She has never been good at them, clearly, or she would have confronted Felix earlier. She has always been better at waiting and seeing. How exhausting decisions are, especially after all the listening. She feels very tired and very old and not at all seductive. Listening has made her feel like a psychiatrist and undressing would be professional misconduct. Still, it has got to be done some time during her three-month sabbatical from Felix and the sooner, she presumes, the better, in case she wants to do it a lot. But it also feels rather more like making an appointment with the dentist for a checkup, to find out if she needs a course of treatment or just a quick scale and polish.
David Johnson parks outside her house. Miles Davis has stopped and so has the humming. Elizabeth feels more
confused than ever. David Johnson is better-looking in the darkness of the car than he was in the restaurant. A nearby street lamp seems to flatter him more than candlelight. He has an urban, contemporary face with hollows and hard bony edges. He says, ‘I’m sorry I talked so much, but it’s partly your fault for being such a wonderful listener.’
Elizabeth says teasingly, ‘I know, I’ve had a lot of practice.’
‘Well.’ He taps his fingers on the steering wheel. ‘I hope you’ll let me make up for it next time. I really do want to get to know you better. Is there going to be a next time, Elizabeth?’
The indecision is worse than ever. She is so evenly divided she thinks she might as well toss a coin. ‘Why not?’ she says lightly, aware that it doesn’t sound very flattering.
‘Good.’ He turns to her then and she thinks this is the moment: he is about to kiss her and that will be a good test. How will the beautiful mouth feel on hers? If she can bear to kiss him, she can bear to go to bed with him; if she can’t bear to kiss him, sex might still be all right but it may be difficult to avoid more kisses. She knows herself well, or rather remembers herself from way back, when she was still a free, independent person. Her two lives, before and after Felix. She still thinks kissing is the most intimate part of a relationship, perhaps because it is so close to the brain, and it is a pity it has to come first.
But David Johnson only brushed her cheek with his lips as anyone might at a party, a social kiss, even a goodnight kiss, and in the context of the evening she finds it oddly tantalising. Without giving herself time to think she says, ‘Shall I invite you in for coffee?’
He shakes his head. ‘Don’t tempt me. I always work from midnight till four. Those are my best hours.’
‘Well,’ she says, rebuffed, and now divided between relief and anger, ‘I’ll say goodnight then and thank you for my lovely dinner.’ She feels like a little girl reciting a speech her mother has taught her to be polite.
‘I’ll phone you,’ he says, the way men do, whether they mean it or not, as if women are not allowed to pick up the phone, as if it was entirely a male decision as to what happens next. She gets out of his car and goes into her house as he drives away.
* * *
It is very quiet and empty. She pours herself a brandy and sits down to consider the evening. She feels restless. She gets up and puts on a CD of Strauss’s Four Last Songs. She realises she wants to ring Felix but knows she won’t. It is war between them and there is no room for weakness: that is not the way battles are won. Loneliness sweeps in like a tide. She thinks what a long way she has to go.
* * *
David Johnson takes her to the Festival Hall to hear the Verdi Requiem.
‘So you’re not just a Miles Davis man,’ she says.
‘I like jazz in the car. It doesn’t do violence to the sound. The Verdi Requiem is what I’d like to hear on my deathbed. I usually try to go to a performance two or three times a year to have it fresh in my mind in case I die young – and not in a car crash, of course.’
She doesn’t know if she’s supposed to laugh, but he looks and sounds perfectly serious. ‘Wouldn’t it be enough to keep playing the CD at home?’ she asks.
‘Not at all.’ He looks shocked. ‘Where’s your sense of occasion?’
‘I was thinking more of a sense of urgency. You could play it any time of the day or night. In case of sudden illness.’
‘I do that as well. I love the grim terror of it as well as the final hope. I always think Fauré chickened out by not having a Dies Irae.’
‘I always thought it was rather sweet and optimistic of Fauré,’ she says, meaning it. ‘There seems to be quite enough wrath in this life already.’
‘A requiem seems to bring out the best in composers, though,’ he says. ‘Have you noticed that? I don’t think I’ve found a duff one yet.’
‘No.’ She runs through the list in her head. ‘I think you’re right.’
‘So, what’s your deathbed music?’
‘Oh – not a requiem. Strauss, I think. The Four Last Songs. Probably the last one.’
‘“Im Abendrot”? “Can this perhaps be death?” Yes, very soothing.’
‘I think peaceful rather than soothing,’ she says firmly.
‘Yes, you’re right. Wrong word. That was careless of me and rather patronising. Sorry. What a lucky old man he was, to write such music so near the end.’
So they’ve exchanged credentials. Taken a few turns round the floor, shown off their medium-level expertise. They’re both acceptably cultured but not too grand or obscure. Now what? How do they get from music to bed? She doesn’t have time for a leisurely friendship, however desirable that might be: she is already halfway through her trial separation and she can hear the clock ticking. Is he ready to make love to her so she can find out if she can respond to anyone other than Felix after sixteen years? It’s something she’s never tried but it might give her some power in the marriage, she thinks. She has had the deathbed music conversation long ago with Felix, who she remembers chose the end of Götterdämmerung. When she said it was an amazing choice because it represented the destruction of the world, Felix said if he was dying that’s exactly what it would be. If they died together, they agreed, as they had once wanted to, at the very beginning, when they were first in love, there would be an almighty collision of sound, or someone would have to relinquish their choice. She thought she would probably be that someone. Why does everything remind her of Felix?
* * *
David Johnson takes her out for dinner and talks about his children. She realises she is flattered to be seen out with an attractive man who is even younger than Felix. Seventeen years seems a lot more than eleven. She imagines people are looking at her with envy, unless perhaps they think he is her son. He does look younger than his age and they both have dark hair. She must try to lose more weight, she thinks: that might make her look younger and impress Felix on his return.
‘I actually think it’s worse for Annabel than Thomas,’ David Johnson says. ‘I think girls need a father more than boys, especially during puberty. She’s thirteen now, she was twelve when we split up and it couldn’t have happened at a worse age. I’m afraid it will affect her relationships with men all her life. Whereas Thomas is only ten and I think he needs Kate more than me at this point. I have them both every other weekend, but it can’t be the same as everyday life. You get that sense of special occasion which may be just what you want in a love affair but is actually the last thing you need with kids. And no matter how hard I try to explain to them I love them and I’ve only gone because Kate and I can’t live together any more, the fact remains I’ve moved out so it looks as if I’ve left them, although it’s only so they can go on feeling secure in the same house. But I can’t be sure they understand that, and I’ve no way of knowing what Kate tells them about me when I’m not there. If I tell them the absolute truth, which is that I wanted to stay but Kate threw me out, it looks as if I’m trying to turn them against their mother, so I have to pretend it was something we agreed on, which really goes against the grain. There’s no way I would ever have chosen to leave them or Kate.’
Elizabeth feels it is all very familiar, as if she is reading an article in the Guardian or listening to a talk on Woman’s Hour.
‘You don’t have children, do you?’ he suddenly says.
‘No.’ It’s a shock that he knows so much about her.
‘I’ve often read interviews with your husband and there was never any mention of children.’
‘No,’ she says again, feeling exposed and defensive.
‘Did you not want any or was it not possible?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you.’
Suddenly it is not pleasant to be out with a goodlooking younger man. Nothing makes up for having her sore places probed like this. She’s amazed he can be so tactless. He is so brutal and direct, he is like a child hi
mself, asking some mutilated person how she got her injuries.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says again. ‘But I’ve told you so much about me and you’ve told me almost nothing about you.’
So easy to say, That’s because you’ve hardly given me a chance; you won’t shut up long enough. But it wouldn’t be altogether true. She doesn’t want to confide and it’s been much easier to let him talk and condemn him for doing so.
‘It’s too painful,’ she says truthfully.
‘I only thought it might help.’
* * *
He drives her home with Bessie Smith on the car stereo, and this time he kisses her goodnight on the lips. She likes the feel of his mouth; in fact she is surprised how much she likes it. She would like a lot more of it. But that is all. One kiss. No other touching. They sit in his car outside her house like an old-fashioned courting couple. She feels young.
This time he says, ‘Goodnight, Elizabeth. Will you ring me?’
And she says, ‘Yes, I will.’
And she does. The very next day. To thank him for dinner.
‘Shall I take you to the opera?’ he says.
‘That would be lovely.’
Nothing is said about Felix.
* * *
Helen is surprised when Elizabeth rings her up about a month later. She is trying to pretend she is not disappointed that Jordan hasn’t rung, that Elizabeth is not in fact Jordan ringing her now. She despises herself for having these adolescent hopes about the phone.
Elizabeth’s voice is full of excitement beneath a controlled surface. ‘I wanted to thank you for telling me the truth and putting up with me that awful day,’ she says. ‘I’m actually having a three-month break from Felix to try and sort things out. I thought you might like to know that.’
A Gift of Poison Page 11