After a few minutes of silence, Caroline said, ‘I’m useless at this. I’m trying to remember what I had with Nicola. What are you having? I can never decide.’
‘Maybe you should text her?’
‘Really?’ she said, lifting her eyes from the menu to try to read me instead. ‘You don’t think that’d be a bit pathetic?’
‘Not a bit,’ I said. ‘A lot! But that’s no reason not to do it. Half the people in here are Instagramming their meals before they eat them. What’s a text between diners? I’m having the fish curry, but they all look good.’
Inspired by my sudden decisiveness, Caroline chose the chicken.
As promised, the food was fresh and flavoursome, and the unicaf atmosphere perfect for dispelling any possible misunderstanding either of us might have had that this was anything more than a shared meal of convenience. The ease we had enjoyed with the table tennis returned as we chatted freely and tried each other’s dishes, congratulating ourselves on our excellent choices.
The noise of our fellow diners, most of whom were young international students enjoying familiar fare, made more meaningful conversation difficult. So as soon as we had eaten we split the bill and made for the door.
In the relative quiet of the street, I asked if she fancied a coffee.
Caroline shook her head. ‘A coffee after six and I’m awake all night. A second wine after nine and I lapse into unconsciousness. It’s a balancing act. Chemically speaking, I’m finely tuned!’
Imagining Sunday prompting me from the wings, I asked, ‘Do you want a lift home?’
Caroline was checking her phone for messages. Confusingly, she said, ‘I would, but no. Thanks. I drove.’
I tried to disguise my disappointment. I wished now I’d trammed it in, then she might have given me a ride. ‘Where’re you parked?’
Like mine, her parking habits dated from an earlier age, when she and her doctor ex used to attend concerts and plays at the Arts Centre. She was parked on the other side of the Yarra, near the Observatory. I offered to walk her there.
‘Are you nearby?’
‘Kind of,’ I lied. ‘It’s such a nice night, I’ll enjoy the walk. Besides, I’m in training – we’ve got a title to defend!’
She laughed, and we talked as we strolled, mainly about fellow staff members, her mining me for my take on different people, she being free with her early impressions. We agreed that Cathy was well-meaning but out of her depth and that the VP was a knob. I explained that before my separation I had kept to myself and that I still wasn’t interested in the politics of the place. She was the same.
‘Sounds corny,’ she said, ‘but for me it really is about the kids. That’s how I got into student welfare. I was more interested in trying to help them than in teaching them. Truth is, I was a pretty ordinary teacher.’
I told her about my roundabout route to teaching, how it had taken me half my adult life to realise I was following the wrong parent’s example. ‘I spent years trying to find my absent father in myself, in some great gift that I didn’t have. As if by being like him, I could fill his void.’ I had never quite thought of it that way before and was surprised to find myself being so open.
Caroline told me about her parents: her dad a surgeon, her mother a nurse, the whole Hollywood cliché. Then she filled me in on Bianca, one of our Year Nine students whose mother had been stabbed by her de facto in an ice-fuelled rage. ‘How different is that to my experience? What chance has she got? Getting your English essay in on time doesn’t seem quite so pressing when you’ve spent the night trying to get your mum into hospital without calling an ambulance because you can’t afford it.’
‘What’d she do?’
‘Drove her herself. No licence, of course. The de facto’s car – him chasing them down the street, yelling, throwing things.’
The full moon made shadows of the hand-span leaves dangling from the plane trees as we walked side by side along the Tan. A night-time jogger scrunched past us on the gravel path. Anticipating his approach, I veered slightly left and accidently brushed my hand against Caroline’s. I wished for the courage to keep it there, to find her fingers with mine, but didn’t want to ruin the time we’d had by misreading the situation. I had never understood how men like my father so readily presumed the reciprocation of their desires.
‘That’s mine, there,’ she said, pointing to an old, long-snouted Saab. Opening her door, she paused before stepping inside. The moon winked behind a cloud, stealing the shine from the duco. ‘Hop in and I’ll drive you to your car?’
For reasons I could not fathom, I knocked back the offer on the grounds that it was out of her way. She said she didn’t mind, and rather than capitulate and be in her debt, I stubbornly maintained my independence.
The moon, returning to full bloom, painted us paler in its glow. ‘I guess I’ll see you Monday,’ she said, dropping into the driver’s seat.
In her smile I saw a wince of disappointment and wanted to reverse my choice but felt trapped by my own awkwardness. Instead, I raised a hand to the windshield in a gesture of helplessness.
Watching her drive away, the tail-lights brightening as she braked at the intersection, I feared her feelings could not be the same as mine. Then, as the car moved forward, the lights blinked back to a duller red and I feared they might have been.
Madigan’s life with Rosalia assumed a rhythm that rendered his lack of productivity irrelevant, at least according to his own reckoning. While he never announced his retirement, for most of his seventies he was, in effect, living the life of someone who had taken down his shingle. Most days passed in a ceaseless flow that saw them merge into weeks and months of pleasant aimlessness. Waking late, taking time over breakfast to read the papers and do the crosswords, he would, out of habit, spend a couple of hours in the middle of the day at his desk. This time was spent writing letters and replying to emails and, when inspired, fiddling with a number of short stories he kept in glacial motion so that he could, when asked, honestly say he was working on something. Only one of these stories was ever completed, ‘Krystal Clear’, which read like a poor pastiche of The Middle Kingdom,* and was wisely never published. Very occasionally, he would commit to a burst of concentrated effort and write a review for the TLS, often on surprising, seemingly random topics. One such was his 2001 review of a clutch of books on fly fishing, a pastime he confessed to having never experienced, but had ‘long enjoyed in his imagination’.º
While generally quiet, the Madigans’ life together was far from isolated. Rosalia’s love of cooking made entertaining easy and they regularly held dinner parties for a roster of the usual suspects. This invariably included Peter Kessler who, single once more, was always keen to be fed. Following the death of Harold Beason, Kessler was Madigan’s oldest friend.
In 2004, at the opening of a Constantin Brancusi retrospective, the latest enfant terrible of American art, Tully Mason, drunkenly mocked Rosalia’s accent and accused her of possessing a ‘peasant’s sensibility’. Tipsy himself, and forgetting his encroaching frailty, Madigan made to punch the much younger man and quickly found himself seated on his backside on the gallery floor. Security guards ejected them both. After that, the Madigans avoided openings and launches, though they maintained their subscription to the National Theatre Company and could still be regularly spotted at West End shows, if less often their premieres.
Every winter they escaped for a month, usually February, to Belle-Île-en-Mer, off the coast of Brittany, where Madigan’s old publishing friend Maurice Hollingdale owned a whitewashed fisherman’s cottage which he leased to them for a pittance. There, he and Rosalia spent their days ‘sunning themselves like seals’, reading and relaxing in and around the cottage or on a nearby secluded beach. Being on the more remote west coast of the island, they could go for days without encountering another soul, a condition that increasingly appealed to Madigan. Once a week they travelled to Le Palais for supplies, and while Rosalia did the shopping Madigan would ha
ve a session in Le Goéland. Pretending he was Hemingway, he avoided the tourists and, with his fluent French, insinuated himself into the grumbled conversations of the local fishermen, most of whom were long retired. In 2005, thanking Hollingdale, as he did every year, Madigan wrote: ‘You have made me happily dull, as I now have no desire to holiday anywhere else in the world. As I discovered upon meeting Rosalia, the rover settles when he finds his paradise. Truly, it is as if I suffer a heavy head cold for eleven months of the year and then for those four golden weeks my sinuses clear.’
The worst of those eleven congested months was not, as might be expected, in the heart of winter, but September, the northern autumn. Since his early sixties, Madigan had come to call that month the Festival of AINT, the Annual Ig-Nobel Torment. Every year for over a decade his name had been among those rumoured to be in the running for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in 1999 and 2008 he was the short-priced favourite in Ladbrokes’ framing of the market. At first he had laughed it off as a flattering lark, but as with all jokes too often repeated it became tedious, then simply annoying. By the fifth year running, he had put a ban on the topic being raised in his presence. In a late letter to Harold Beason he playfully suggested ‘surströmming° is not the rankest export Sweden has inflicted on the world, that gong going to the King Gong, old Freddie Nobel himself, with his fistful of dynamite dollars excavating the souls of authors the world over’.
* Where in The Middle Kingdom the protagonist was an architect and his love interest a young Chinese intern, in ‘Krystal Clear’ he is an ageing dentist, the object of his geriatric desire the eponymous dental nurse. Like a late Woody Allen film, the story mines an old reef and rather than unearth a deeper gem instead reveals and polishes the flaws of the earlier find.
º This perhaps explains why the merchant banker Gordon Glint was given this hobby in Glint, obsessively pursuing it on his Scottish estate, Glen Lovat.
° Surströmming, a traditional Swedish delicacy of fermented rotting herring, is renowned for its putrid, hydrogen sulphide (rotten-egg gas) odour.
Sinclair Hughes, Inside the Lion’s Den: The Literary Life of Gilbert Madigan, p. 472-473.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Allowing my fantasies about Caroline to outrun reality – lapping it in the straight – I imagined introducing her as my partner to Noah and Sunday. I was determined not to repeat Marj’s mistake of keeping her relationship with Helen Macpherson a secret from me. While that deception saved me from having to defend their love to my peers, I still regretted that it denied me the chance to draw closer to Mac.
After Tamara Billings, Gil hadn’t bothered keeping me abreast of his roll call of partners. That changed with Rosalia, when he wrote to me about his late-in-life discovery of contentment. ‘After two failed marriages, one might have thought it wise to avoid revisiting that institution, yet yesterday Rosalia and I went to the Westminster Register Office, where, in the plainest of ceremonies, we pledged our love before the law. Strangely, rather than undermine the credibility of this contract, my past inability to keep similar commitments underscores the seriousness with which this one is undertaken. Although a poor peasant, I’m happier than a king because at last I have found contentment. Only smugness can make a pauper of me now. I often think that if I’d met Rosalia in my youth I might never have written a word.’
Of course, then, I would not have existed – a possibility that seemingly would not have drawn down his emotional riches.
I’m not proud of it, but I won’t pretend otherwise: my response to the news of their marriage was entirely ungenerous. Assuming Gil was right and that this love would last, how was it that someone already blessed with talent and acclaim, someone who had left behind him a trail of hurt and neglect, could also receive this late-in-life dispensation? If I were religious, such injustice in the distribution of grace would have either unseated my faith or confirmed its conviction that justice exists only in the afterlife; that Gil would get his comeuppance there. As it is, I am left with the cold consolation of arbitrariness, a growing despair that the meek inherit nothing but the contempt of the self-serving.
As for my own inheritance, it will now reflect the relationship I had hoped it would compensate: a promise never fulfilled, an absent patrimony from an absent patriarch. Gil had never been seriously wealthy, but his royalties and the regular renewal of lapsed film rights had always kept him in comfort, and the Hampstead house he had bought in the seventies was now worth more than I will ever earn. I had always taken some reassurance from the knowledge that one day I would share with Reuben the spoils of Gil’s estate. Although I would not have admitted it at the time, the promise of this late-in-life income had underwritten my dismissive, carefree approach to the idea of career. If not in life, then in death, my father would protect me. He was, I had thought, my ace in the hole.
Now, with his new wife only thirteen years my senior, that security was destroyed; his legacy as a parent complete. How could I celebrate his happiness?
Before meeting Rosalia, I had (admittedly with little imagination) envisaged her as a shameless gold-digger, a buxom bombshell who had done the maths and was willing to indulge the fading desires and sad vanities of an ageing author to reap her reward in his afterlife.
In 1998, she accompanied Gil as he combined a trip to give the keynote speech at the Melbourne Writers Festival with introducing himself to Noah, his first grandchild. So different was she from my clichéd imaginings that at first I struggled to make the connection. Already nervous, I became confused when I opened the door at Munro Street. Gil had aged dramatically since I last saw him. His green eyes seemed startled to find themselves surrounded by so much wrinkled skin. I realised the publicity shot for the festival was either ten years old or heavily photoshopped. The woman next to him looked like a model. She wore heels but would have been tall without them. Her long, shapely legs disappeared into a short, tightly fitted skirt. She looked to be in her early thirties, her black hair cut into an asymmetrical bob, her full, red-painted lips parting in a smile as she greeted me.
‘And you must be Rosalia,’ I said, offering my hand.
‘No, no,’ Gil interjected, uncustomarily flustered. ‘This is Hilary. She’s my minder from Penguin, to make sure I don’t get into trouble. This,’ he said, turning to the woman standing behind him, ‘is Rosalia.’
Blushing at my mistake, I turned my attention to my father’s new wife.
‘Really, I am the one to stop him making trouble. Before me, Hilary would be trouble.’
From the outset Gil was off-kilter, and for the rest of the visit never regained his famous poise. Strangely, he seemed to enjoy having his defences brought low by Rosalia’s mix of rebuke and tenderness.
Against all expectations, Nat’s as well as mine, Rosalia didn’t look particularly young. Her eyes, a fathomless brown, radiated ripples of lines when she smiled, and the glossiness of her black hair made the flecks of grey all the more striking. Her beauty – which might more accurately be called presence – owed more to antiquity than youth; to some elusive quality that transcended the temporariness of fashion. The attraction of Rosalia was her aliveness in every encounter, her openness to the possibilities of people – just like Gil when he was younger. Nat, even more than me, was primed to despise her, but only minutes after their introduction she found herself telling Rosalia about Noah’s breastfeeding problems, and even the details of his gruelling birth, something she hadn’t shared even with her mother. Staring into the cot where Noah lay squirming, his arms and legs jolting spastically at unseen assailants, Rosalia asked Nat if she could hold him. Gentle, assured, she lifted him to her breast. When he began to cry she swayed him in her arms and softly sang to him in Spanish. Once he had settled, she said, ‘I am like a chicken, no, sitting on her nest? Look at him, Gilberto, your nieto. He is so beautiful.’
Gil, like most men of his generation, was clueless about babies. Ignorance, as always, bred fear. When Rosalia suggested he nurse his grandson, he
crossed his arms and shrank into himself. Coaxing him into trying, instructing him on how to position his arms, she laid Noah in the cradle of his forearm. Snuggling up to them both, she created a safety net that allowed Gil to relax. ‘That’s it, Abuelo. He’s a bebé, not a rattlesnake.’
Nat fetched the camera and took a sequence of shots recording the moment when Gil hugged his grandson for the first and only time, and I became incapable of hating the woman who had robbed me of my inheritance.
Sunday’s slip about Nat seeing someone new had pierced my protective skin like a splinter. The flesh around it swelled, suppurated. Rationally, I thought it good she was moving on. Despite my hurts and resentments about the house, I wished her nothing less than happiness and genuinely hoped she found someone who possessed what I lacked: drive, direction, meaningful ambition. To combat the infection, I tried to draw the sliver out by mentioning it to Noah.
‘Yeah, maybe,’ he said. ‘She’s always out.’
‘What’s his name?’
Noah was struggling to open a packet of two-minute noodles, the seal holding firm against his efforts. ‘Can’t remember. Finbar?’ He grimaced as he pulled. ‘Is that a name?’ The plastic finally yielded and the bag burst open, sending noodle fragments everywhere. He caught the main slab of them and dropped it in the water boiling on the stove. ‘I only met him once. He reckoned he was a hardcore gamer, back in the day.’
‘Maybe he was.’
‘Yeah, what, Pac-Man?’
I had been meaning to ask Nat about the new man in her life, but the opportunity hadn’t presented itself the past few times we had dropped off or collected the kids. I could, at least in the abstract, contemplate us having that conversation without acrimony or even much embarrassment. I was pleased about that, and thought it reflected well on us both. My sole concern now was for Noah and Sunday. Whoever Nat re-partnered with had to respect them for who they were and not try to usurp my role in their lives. At their best, when people were civil and adult about things, divorces could, I believed, expand the worlds of the kids involved rather than shatter them. I thought we had a chance at that, a good one. I could imagine someone like Caroline becoming important in Sunday’s life, another adult who had her back, offering advice and perspectives that neither Nat nor I could provide. And from the other side, perhaps with time Nat’s gaming man, someone more in sync with the zeitgeist, could reach Noah in ways not available to me. I liked to believe I could rise above the petty jealousies that might engender.
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