'It's good you want to give support,' said Melanie. 'You're not used to being relied on. You tend to drift along your own way.' She had an impressive confidence in her assessment of other people. 'What about the little boy?'
'What about him?' replied Theo.
'Is he a nice kid? Can you see him with you for years and years when he has a dad of his own? I imagine it's not an easy situation.'
'I quite like him. Not that I've talked to him much.'
'What's his name again?'
'Ben.'
'I thought some of the best bits in your articles were about him — about his need to have other kids to play with, and other adults despite Penny's devotion. She'd be aware of that too: the effects on him if they stayed hidden away for long.'
Melanie and Theo had moved into the small lounge to talk, and the fragrance of cannelloni drifted through to them from the oven. Theo neither resisted, nor resented, the talk of Penny and himself. In some ways it was a relief to discuss it, yet it made him sad again. There were so many checks and balances against happiness, and so many opportunities for hurt and disappointment from every decision.
'I may be heading for a rather similar situation,' said Melanie. 'Becoming involved with someone with kids, I mean.'
'Really? Do I know him?' But Melanie had gone off into the kitchen to get their meals, and called back that she'd tell him about it in a minute. It's easy to think that your own existence is the only one which progresses, and that other people in your absence become stationary, awaiting the return which activates their lives again. Such selfishness Theo recognised in himself, even without Melanie's cheerful mention of it.
'Robin Sellus,' she said, when they were eating. 'He's an architect with rooms at Papanui. The daughters are aged three and five. His wife died two years ago of a stroke.'
'How did you meet him?'
'He bought the place next door.'
'Here?' said Theo, surprised. The oddity of having Melanie's newly disclosed boyfriend so close inclined him to lower his voice.
'Of course here,' said Melanie. 'He's a nice guy and the kids are really good most of the time. They have a sort of housekeeper-cum-nanny.'
'I really hope it works out,' said Theo.
He meant it, but couldn't help but be struck by the element of convenient coincidence. The architect moving house and finding love, a wife and mother, next door. But that was the way in life. The myth of there being only one person for you in all the world, and the reality that you end up with someone close at hand. It was the same with Penny and him — that he should be attracted to her in the course of his work, and she at Drybread with no other contact with men. How unpropitious for stability the circumstances were.
Theo had come to Melanie's as a friend. She had clearly signalled that there would be no sex, yet despite that, despite his wish that she find satisfaction in marrying the architect and caring for his daughters, Theo felt a slight awkwardness. It wasn't that he was wrong in his understanding of Melanie's independence, but that, illogically, the presence of Robin Sellus in the next property seemed inhibiting. Perhaps he was watching from a darkened room to see when Theo left; perhaps he was showing a determined trust and reading storybooks to his young daughters; perhaps he hadn't been told that Melanie was serving cannelloni to an old boyfriend.
'You mentioned I'd be here?' he asked her.
'I did, yes. No big deal. We'll still be friends, won't we, Theo?'
'Of course we will,' Theo said.
'I believe you're entitled to keep the best of past relationships when you move on. Not the shagging, of course, but the friendship, the support, the shared experiences. Why should what's happened with one person be buried by being with another, when there's no guilt involved?'
'Absolutely,' Theo said.
'If there's a wedding, and it won't be any big deal, you'll get an invitation. I hope you'll like him.' Melanie pressed the abundance of her hair down with a small hand and leant back in the chair to rest her head and settle in for a good chat. Theo wondered what it was like to go through life so physically diminutive, and with so resolute a character. He had no clear recollection of the first time he'd met her. Odd, for the advents of Stella and Penny were clear in his mind. Penny with her head back in sleep, and her graceful throat, as he first looked through the window at Drybread. Stella he saw first on the ramp of a parking building, after an exhibition opening at the new gallery that he'd reluctantly covered. She was wearing high heels, and was holding her arms out from her sides a little as a precaution on the damp concrete slope. She was laughing with a woman friend, and as she glanced at Theo in passing, the amusement was still there, like the flash of a colourful bird in flight.
'Maybe that's one of the things with you and Stella,' Melanie was saying. 'Because of the outcome you don't allow yourself to remember all the good things, the strengths she had, what you accomplished together. She doesn't criticise you all the time, you know.'
'I don't criticise her at all,' said Theo.
'The point is you hardly talk about it. The two of you managed the split bloody well, but I think you've got into the habit of always being sad about it.'
'It is sad, and talking doesn't help.'
'Have it your own way,' said Melanie. 'I reckon you spend too much time with Nick, and he's so bloody cynical. All those anecdotes when in fact he doesn't do much any more. You don't want to become part of some sort of club for divorced guys.'
It was ten twenty when Theo left. Not late, but he glanced at the architect's house as they said goodbye at the door. Melanie gave him a hug in which the significant pressure was all in the upper body. 'You make sure you keep in touch now,' she said. There was a cool breeze, a horned moon and many stars. He thought how wonderful a late night run would be in Hagley Park — the play of tree shadows in the mild wind and dim light, the ducks in headless clusters, the sharded sheen on dark water, the night sky's sense of vast hollowness, the freedom to bear a relaxed, nocturnal face through it all, rather than maintaining the conventional expressions of the day.
25
'I want to go running,' said Nicholas, two evenings later. 'I need that adrenalin rush, or endorphin high, or whatever. I'm stale and overworked, I've eaten too much — I'm bored fucking silly.' He'd been drinking, of course. His voice wasn't slurred on the phone: Nicholas never became falling-down drunk. He was contemptuous of people who took refuge in drink, who lost self-control, who couldn't face whatever was handed out to them. But he had drunk enough to make it natural to ring Theo at nightfall and want to go running.
'You're too old, and too unfit,' said Theo.
'You don't know what old is. I gave a talk to a Probus club today, and the experience terrified me. Row after row of geriatrics with necks like cabbage stalks, bright, nylon hair, and denture-swollen grins. I think they were all on medication. Really old people will applaud anything: have you noticed that? I gave them of my worst and they were spellbound. I think what they're really celebrating when they clap is the confirmation of their own existence as an audience, that they're still alive, that the address has come from someone other than the grim reaper.'
'You couldn't keep up on a run, but if you like I'll come round in half an hour and we'll have a walk.'
'Thanks,' said Nicholas with false humbleness. 'Will it be a brisk walk? There's something very English and bracing about a brisk walk.'
Theo almost reset his desk layout trap for the parson, before recalling his talk with Erskine in Nice. The search for Penny and Ben was no longer a priority for anyone.
Nicholas had a ground-floor apartment and a small enclosed courtyard close to the town hall. He'd made preparations for the walk by rooting out a pair of cheap, barely worn sneakers with such garish colours that they glowed in the dusk. Apart from these he seemed exactly as he would appear at his desk in the reporters' room. 'I'm going to start an exercise regime,' he told Theo as they headed past the floral clock and towards the river.
'Do Probus pay well
?' asked Theo.
'No. Wine and flowers seem to be the thing. It's not lucrative at all. I've had to say no to a swag of other Probus clubs, Rotary, drop-in centres, even Grey Power. It's those stories I did on the third age that started it all. There's a whole world out there of people past their use-by date; and a different language of joint operations, protheses, magnetic underblankets, reverse mortgages, memory aids, and risk-free minor activities for physical and mental prolongation.'
Nicholas wasn't a great walker, and his speed was in inverse proportion to the amount of talking he did and its significance. While dismissing old people he maintained a reasonably steady pace, but when he came to discuss women he was reduced to a stroll. He wanted to know how things were between Penny and Theo. Theo was quite open, and told him of his hopes once the custody thing was out of the way. There was one thing he didn't mention: he said nothing about Penny's father and her childhood. He didn't know enough, but more than that, he felt a strong repugnance for what might lie there.
'Do you think about her a lot?' asked Nicholas.
'I do,' said Theo. 'I think about being with her, and I wish I could do more to help. I grizzle about my life, and here's Penny's going through some sort of hell.'
'It's important you think about her so much. It's a sign when someone inhabits you even when absent.'
'Sometimes I dream about her,' said Theo.
'Oh, yes.'
'No, not sex usually. More about being with her when she's happy again. Most of the time I've had this feeling that everything I talk about is unimportant compared with the devastation of her own life.'
'I dream about my boys,' said Nicholas. 'And they still have the same voices, they're the same size, as when we were a family. Trish is never there — I suppose there's some Freudian explanation for that.'
Theo remembered Trish as being just as intelligent as Nicholas, and with greater warmth. They'd seemed compatible. Maybe some issue of principle had driven them apart; maybe just a trivial trait of character, grown rampant and insupportable. Nicholas always spoke of their split as if it had been an act of God, like an avalanche, or a meteor strike. Theo wasn't surprised that Nicholas often thought of his family past: nostalgia is a harmless form of depression.
They turned into one of the lesser streets, which was still well lit, but much quieter, with spaced young rowan trees along the grass strip where they walked. The line of streetlights played tricks with their shadows, and when they were half way between two poles, Theo and Nicholas had multiplied, with equal-density shadows both behind them and before.
'So you quite liked Nice?' enquired Nicholas.
'I did. Mainly I suppose because things worked out okay.'
'And the Maine-King husband coughed up for all expenses?'
'Yep.'
'Lucky bastard,' said Nicholas. He meant Theo, not Erskine Maine-King, though wealth impresses most of us. 'I've never been to Nice,' he said, 'but I spent a week in Arles years ago. An interesting river, Roman ruins and all that exploitation of the Van Gogh connection, although they despised the poor bastard when he lived there. There were begging dogs there, I remember, and when we were waiting to leave at the small railway station, a taxi driver was discovered dead in his cab. I had a glimpse of his face and it was very restful. You must be getting pretty close to Penny Maine-King in all of this support you're giving. You're not screwing her, are you?'
'No,' said Theo. From anyone else the remark would have angered him, but it was just his friend's way.
'I have a good feeling about it, about it all working out the way you and Penny deserve,' said Nicholas.
They walked along the river, then into Bealey Avenue with its central divide of large, dark trees, and traffic lights gleaming ahead. Nicholas said his two sons were coming to stay with him during the term holidays. He saw them only once or twice a year, when he paid for them to fly over. Charles was seventeen and Morgan two years younger. 'They just go gadding when they're here,' said Nicholas. 'They never say anything personal, so neither do I. It's as if the set-up is the most normal in the world, or too fucked up to talk about.'
'It's the same for a lot of kids now.'
'They'd never tell me anything about themselves if I didn't ask. I've been paying maintenance all these years, and Trish never even sends me a copy of their school reports. I know nothing about them. Two strangers come and call me dad. They eat a lot and go to movies and the beach, watch crap television. The little buggers never say thank you for anything, and they never seem to wash. They're like a war party of two: arriving, laying waste, then shooting through.'
'Well, you're not part of their real lives, are you? You're the holiday man.'
'Exactly,' said Nicholas morosely. They had turned into Colombo Street, back towards the central city. His cheap, firefly sneakers glinted as they passed under the spreading trees, and he peered into the darkness.
'You're just an old bugger of no account to them,' said Theo. He was determined to be realistic in the appraisal of his own life, so why shouldn't such pragmatism extend to his friends.
'Mind you,' said Nicholas, 'it would have happened anyway, even if Trish and I hadn't split. Boys cast off their parents, and resist parenthood themselves for as long as they can.'
Theo didn't answer, but he thought about his own move from home, the sense of expansion, the lack of homesickness and the disregard of subsequent communication. If he'd had children he would be in the same situation as Nicholas. Maybe daughters were different, but then their natural sympathy in a separation would be with their mother.
'You know what was just about the worst part of it all for me,' said Nicholas. He didn't expect a response, didn't wait for one. 'It was clearing out the bloody house where we'd lived as a family. All the junk that nevertheless meant something and was so painful to jettison. Especially the kids' stuff.' Theo could understand that. He'd experienced it, except that it must be worse with children's things. He sensed Nicholas's fear as all the trivial, physical totems of his family life were scattered and lost their potency. The trike hanging in the basement recess with small blisters of rust showing through the dusty red paint, and on the same hook a pair of ice-skates, the white leather of the boots brittle and contorted. The board games in the bottom drawer, with ludo counters, play money, pencil stubs and small dice in a chocolate box on which one of the boys had written 'Crap' in black felt pen in the pique of defeat. The battery men with shiny, carapace torsos and macho expressions, but with their source of power gone and an arm or leg missing. Discarded cellphones with which the boys had mimicked their parents, and the favourite books worn almost to disintegration. Theo imagined Nicholas in the desperate disposal of a haphazard accumulation which was the archaeology of his family life.
They had almost done a circuit, and were heading towards the town hall and the river from a different direction, through the mainly one-storey shops and premises of modest commercial firms. Only the restaurants were open, their light spilling weakly onto the footpath, and the few diners glimpsed hunched over their food as if they feared dispossession. Nicholas had finished with his trials as a separated father, and was becoming almost cheerful in detailing the vicissitudes that had beset the university journalism department since his resignation. No one is indispensable, but to have your replacements suffer misfortune, or the consequences of their inadequacies, is heartening. 'I could see it coming all along,' said Nicholas. 'Too many pointy heads, too much ideology and wankerism.'
His perspicacity did not extend to random physical threat, however, and he was unlucky enough to laugh while passing one of the few parked cars, and the only one that was occupied. 'Who are you laughing at, fuckface?' and Theo and Nicholas were abruptly aware of the elbows jutting from the car's open windows, and behind them a bobbing agitation of faces like pantomime masks on sticks. Without thinking, Nicholas and Theo paused, when they should have carried on.
'What?' said Nicholas.
'Don't fucking what me, you shithead.' The car see
med to erupt bodies: young guys with shaved hair and big boots, all suddenly in violent movement within the poor light and shadows. They weren't tall, or bulky, but seemed to burn with the necessity to oppose — not anything specific, just what was there. And Theo and Nicholas were there. They were on P or something, surely, or they were so bored they were going to pound their way out of it.
'Steady on, mate,' said Theo, though there were four of them, their faces pushing into his personal space.
'Not so funny now, is it.'
'You gutless old cunts.'
'Yeah, not so funny now, you useless old fuckers.'
It was the accusation of being old that Theo resented most. He was thirty-eight after all, though admittedly Nicholas was forty-six. He had a momentary macho flare in which he thought of challenging one of the four to have a go, but he knew it didn't work like that, and what might they have as well as their fists and boots: short, straight knives, probably, and their thick foreheads full into your face. Besides, his last physical response, to the parson, had been a signal failure. He and Nicholas began backing towards the nearest open door, which was the entrance of a Chinese restaurant bold with rampant dragons in red and gold, but humble in internal dimensions.
Theo was aware that both he and Nicholas were placatory, even abject, in what they said. Sentences about no need for this, about no offence meant, remonstrances about the wrong end of the stick and cooling down, and taking it easy. Nicholas had the palm of one hand up like a traffic controller as the guys pushed closer. They closed in as a sudden, violent flurry when Theo and Nicholas were pushing open the restaurant door. The most painful blow Theo got was below his ear on the left side. It felt as if it had been delivered by an elbow rather than a fist. Theo was surprised a slight man could hit so hard. He and Nicholas were injected into the restaurant, stumbling upon a girl coming to see what the ruckus was. 'Call the police,' said Theo. He glanced at the three diners; a couple at one table, a older man in a bush shirt at another. He wasn't so much checking the level of protection, as ensuring that there was no one who would recognise him, no one to carry forth a description of his indignity.
Drybread: A Novel Page 17