Finer Things

by David Wharton

  After a couple of minutes’ pushing and pulling, she managed to unplug the pigeonhole. Then, resisting her first impulse to dump the whole lot in the bin without further investigation, she transported the stack of documents to the woodwormy table in the middle of the room and began unenthusiastically rifling through. There was, she supposed, a possibility she might find something here of actual importance.

  Between back issues of the Review, and sometimes buried in their pages, were countless bits of communication, all meaningless. Overdue notices for books she’d long since returned to the library, circulars from half a dozen student societies she’d joined and lost interest in, reminders about events she’d already missed. This, she thought, might be the story of a parallel Theresa Green: one who had held on to the ideas she’d brought to Moncourt, one who still believed she could become an artist.

  Then she found something unexpected: an envelope, addressed to her in Jimmy’s handwriting, c/o Moncourt Institute. Postmarked Trencham, Kent. It was dated three weeks ago; the day after he’d left. The words IMPORTANT and PRIVATE had been scored deeply in black capitals on both sides.

  Inside she found four sheets of paper torn from a sketchbook – just like the note Valerie Woodrow had shown her. Both sides of each page were covered in Jimmy’s tiny, wobbly scrawl.

  Dear Tess,

  Excuse the handwriting: I’m doing this on the train, and I’m in a bit of a state, as you’ll understand once I’ve explained myself.

  I’m on my way back to my dad’s house in Kent now, to take some time to think about everything. Whether I come back to Moncourt or not is just one aspect of it. Of course, Moncourt may not even take me back. The way things are, that’s just a risk I have to accept.

  It’s hard to know where to start explaining. There’s so much I haven’t told you about myself. I hope you aren’t feeling personally responsible for my having run away from everything like this. I feel bad about our silly little disagreement yesterday. I acted like a child. Please don’t take anything I said to heart. I had other things on my mind.

  It started that night at the Gaudi, when we met William Shearsby.

  14

  When Tess had first tried to persuade Jimmy he should join her and Penny for a night out in Soho with Marius Shearsby, he’d told her the idea didn’t appeal to him in the slightest. She kept on wheedling. Francis Bacon might be there, she said, and Lucien Freud and Marius’s writer father, whose name she didn’t recall.

  ‘Bound to be some awful old Tory journalist,’ Jimmy said.

  ‘No. He’s a playwright. Used to be one of the Angry Young Men.’

  That was when he made the connection. ‘Hold on. Are you talking about William Shearsby?’

  ‘Yes. I think so. He left Marius’s mother years ago.’

  ‘Find out, Tess. If it really is him, I’ll come along.’

  William Shearsby was an important name to Jimmy. Two years previously, his sixth-form art teacher had recommended a touring production of a play she’d seen during its original London run. He’d never heard of either the play or its writer, but he trusted this teacher’s opinions, so he travelled alone to Margate to see Consider This Your Notice, for himself, in a half-empty theatre.

  The play told the story of an elderly woman, sacked after a lifetime working in a laundry. At first it was confusing, because scenes kept alternating between the protagonist’s final day of employment and events from earlier in her life. But once Jimmy had grasped the pattern, he saw how each juxtaposition of the present-day with the past illustrated some way in which modern people failed to see the value of the past or learn the lessons of history. It was bleak and upsetting, and unlike anything he had ever experienced. When he returned to school the day afterwards, he talked excitedly about it with his art teacher, and she, an old socialist who had, in her twenties, marched with the Jarrow Crusade, suggested he go to the public library and take out a couple of Shearsby’s other playscripts.

  He’d read three of them. Perhaps it was because they were words intended for performance and seemed dead without actors to speak them, but none had moved him in the same way as Consider This Your Notice. He had half forgotten the play, until that conversation with Tess when, with a shock of recognition, he recalled how utterly that night in the theatre had seemed to change his perceptions of the world. And so when he saw her the next day and she confirmed that Marius really was, astonishingly, the son of William Shearsby, Jimmy agreed to go.

  At first, he told himself he could approach it all quite dispassionately. But as the night approached, making a good impression on the playwright, and finding an opportunity to talk about Consider This Your Notice seemed more and more important to him. Consequently, by the time he set out for that evening in Soho, he’d become terrified by the certainty that he was going to make a fool of himself.

  And he was right. Things had gone disastrously. In Jimmy’s attic bedroom, the luminous hands of his alarm clock clicked into place at 5 a.m. and the horror was still circling his mind. William Shearsby had thought he was an idiot, or, worse, had barely noticed him at all. Picking that fight with Marius afterwards had gone some way to improving Jimmy’s state of mind, but now he was alone in the dark it all grew worse and worse to him.

  Looking up at the ceiling window, out at the moon, cold and silent and very far away, he recalled how, the day she showed him around the house, he had told Val Woodrow his main interest in this room was the light.

  ‘It’s perfect for an art student,’ he had said.

  Then Val had told him how the previous occupant had set up a telescope under the skylight. He had been an astronomy PhD student at King’s College, and this telescope of his was so huge there was only just room to squeeze his head between the eyepiece and the floor.

  ‘He’d lie there on his back for hours,’ she said, ‘scowling up at the stars, getting splinters in the back of his head.’

  Jimmy thought now of that astronomer, and of all the other lodgers who had sweated and cried into this mattress, who had lain under the same bone-faced moon, masturbating with a slow, cautious hand to keep the bed frame from creaking. All of them had bathed in the same bath, all had shat in the same lavatory. And each of these young men was a chapter in Charlie’s decline from brilliance to incoherence. Where were they now? He knew Val kept in touch with some of them. Cards at Christmas. The rest might be dead for all she knew.

  Just before Christmas, one ex-tenant had turned up with his wife and two young children for a nostalgic tour of the premises. He’d been there a decade previously, and Val clearly struggled to recall his name until the man’s wife, spotting the awkward way she was avoiding it, said pointedly, ‘Theo always speaks very fondly of you and the professor.’

  ‘Would it be all right if we went up to your room for a few minutes?’ asked the man who they all now knew was called Theo. And Jimmy had thought no it wouldn’t be all right, really, but there did not seem to be any way to say that.

  ‘I did English at University College,’ Theo said, while his wife waited awkwardly in the doorway, and the two children sat, bored and fractious, on Jimmy’s bed. ‘You’re an art student, aren’t you?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You must really love the light through this window.’

  ‘I do,’ Jimmy had said.

  But the truth was he’d never done much painting or drawing here, and the real attraction of the skylight had been neither the stars nor the light. It was access. He’d seen it as soon as he stepped through the Woodrows’ gate for the first time. Someone could clamber out through that window, onto the tall, dangerous roof, and jump off. He, Jimmy Nichols, could. The excitement of that secret idea had flipped around inside him like a dying fish. He had taken the room because of it.

  After he moved in, he’d discovered he should have looked more closely. The window frame had been painted shut. But, he told himself, it wasn’t as if he’d been planning anything seriously. Anyway, the light was good in there, and London
offered plenty of other ways to kill yourself. You might leap in front of a speeding Tube train, pick a fight with some hardcase in a pub. Drop quietly at midnight into the filth of the Thames. So many opportunities in the city. It was just a matter of choosing.

  Now, however, kept awake by the shame of last night at the Gaudi, it seemed to him that the roof was the right way after all.

  He raised himself from the bed and stepped quietly across the uncarpeted floor, taking care to keep his footsteps light because Val and Charlie slept in the room directly below. Here on his desk lay a folding knife: keen and practical for sharpening pencils, useful for holding against the edge of a steel ruler and slicing around pictures when a composition needed to be reshaped. The blade was tucked away inside the wooden handle. Just enough metal showed to let him grip it between two fingernails and pull against the spring inside until he felt the simple mechanism click into the open position. It was frighteningly sharp. Once, whilst using it to peel an orange, he had accidentally sliced across the pad of his own thumb, deep into the meat. The trail of Japanese flags he had splashed onto the floorboards was faded now, but still visible all the way to the bathroom sink, and the scar on his hand would remain with him for as long as he lived. That orange juice had stung too, he recalled, with an almost sexual pleasure.

  He pressed the blunt side of the knife against his wrist. How would he feel if he were to flip it over, he wondered, if he should saw it back and forth and let the keen edge bite into his blood vessels? But instead he reached up and pushed the knifetip into the corner where the window frame met the casement. The skin of paint yielded and split under the lightest pressure. He dragged the blade down and across, easily unsealing the join all the way around, then he closed the knife and placed it on the sill. It was no trouble now to swing the window open, letting in a gulp of cold early morning air.

  Best not to think about the end point until later, he thought. Stage one had been cutting the window free. That alone was a statement of intent. Stage two would be climbing onto the roof. He lifted himself through and swung his feet out onto the tiles. Then he sat in his pyjamas and slippers on the steep slope and looked out across the city. Dawn was not far off. The sky, still densely black at its core, had started to lighten at the edges. Silhouettes of TV aerials stuck up from a few chimneys.

  Of course it would be absurd to jump off a roof over William Shearsby’s opinion of him. But it was not absurd to be sick to death of being the sort of person who could care about a thing like that, who could let it bother him into insomnia. There were so many problems in the world that actually mattered: civil rights in America; prison camps in Russia; the Congo Crisis. South African apartheid. Yet those horrors bothered him less than a meaningless snub from a man he’d met only once.

  He would not throw himself off the roof because he’d failed to impress William Shearsby. He’d do it because letting himself be devastated by something so trivial was clear proof that he didn’t deserve to live.

  His motivation having been arrived at logically, he moved on to practical matters. He’d need to choose his position carefully, find a spot from which he could more or less guarantee success. If he landed on the lawn, he might do no more than break a leg, or his back, and have to lie in agony and humiliation until the milkman found him an hour or two later.

  Between the window where he currently sat and the edge of the roof lay a long, steep slope of tiles. Stage three, therefore, was to make his way down to the gutter and find the point directly above the flagstone path. A head-first dive ought to do the trick. Arms tight against his sides.

  It had been raining, his letter to Tess said, and there was moss on the tiles, so the roof was wet and slippery. I started edging my way down.

  The next morning, surprised still to be alive, he asked Val about local doctors’ surgeries.

  ‘Are you unwell?’ she asked.

  ‘I just thought I should get myself registered.’

  She left it at that, probably imagining he’d contracted something embarrassing – or shameful. Perhaps she was right, he thought. She gave him the address of a group practice nearby, and on his way home from Moncourt that evening, he went in to sign up. Once he’d filled in his form, he asked how soon he might see someone. If he was willing to wait for half an hour, the receptionist told him, there was a new doctor at the practice who had an appointment free.

  Jimmy didn’t like doctors. Professional men in general he found high-handed, overly keen to require from him an unearned deference – or was that just men? Dr Malvern, however, seemed different. At the start of the consultation, he squeezed out from behind his desk to shake Jimmy’s hand: a clumsy, endearing gesture. He was older than Jimmy had expected, gruff-voiced, poorly shaven, with an air of generous-spirited disorganisation.

  ‘Quite refreshing to have a patient of my own,’ he said, wheezing a little as he made his way back to the chair behind his desk. ‘Only been here a couple of months myself, and the regulars all want their usual blokes. They’ll take me on sufferance, as a last resort. It’s understandable – now, what’s the problem, James?’

  Never having told anyone before, Jimmy had wondered how he could broach this. There seemed no indirect route.

  ‘I’ve been feeling suicidal,’ he said. This was already quite a relief, he thought. Just sharing the burden with a kind stranger. It might be enough on its own.

  ‘I see.’ Dr Malvern’s professional concern seemed utterly ordinary, as if Jimmy had just told him he’d developed a rash on his neck. ‘And how long has this been going on, exactly?’

  ‘Forever.’

  There were biscuit crumbs on Malvern’s shirt front. He noticed them and brushed them off. ‘Can you be more precise, James? For example, can you pin down your earliest memory of a suicidal idea?’

  Of course he could. He’d thought about this enough times, unarchiving his own past to try and untangle the mess of his emotions. ‘Do you know Tom Sawyer?’

  The doctor nodded and smiled, ‘I suppose you’re talking about the part where they all think Tom’s dead, and he gets to see his own funeral?’

  Warm relief flooded through Jimmy. This man understood. ‘I’d have been eight or nine, I suppose. I never wanted to be Tom, though. I wanted to be Huck Finn.’

  Malvern looked puzzled by this. ‘If I remember right, Tom’s the one they’re all so sad about.’

  ‘That’s right. Nobody cares about Huck. It’s like he’s not even there. He only gets the funeral because they all think Tom’s dead too, and when they come back it’s only Tom they’re pleased to see. Obviously that’s meant to be awful for Huck, but I envied him for it.’

  Jimmy looked down at his hands and imagined the book in them. He’d read it countless times, knew almost by touch the cover picture of Tom tricking Ben Rogers into whitewashing the fence. It was a children’s edition, simplified and abridged, on coarse, cheap paper embedded with the odd chip of flat, unpulped wood. He recalled the way the print’s edges blurred where the ink had soaked in and spread.

  ‘I’d think about it all the time. How nice it would be to escape into silence and darkness. While most of my friends were getting stuck into their wet dreams about the chemistry teacher, mine were all about how I could vanish from the world.’

  ‘Are you saying there was a . . . sexual element to your thoughts of death?’

  Jimmy noticed that despite the studious objectivity of his tone, Malvern’s cheeks had coloured a little.

  ‘Sorry, no. That was a joke. I should stick to the facts, shouldn’t I?’

  ‘It’s fine. Only – forgive me for asking – was it just the death fantasies, or did you also have an interest in this chemistry mistress?’

  At Jimmy’s secondary modern there had been both schoolmasters and schoolmistresses. He had said ‘chemistry teacher’ on purpose.

  ‘Yes. That sort of thing went on in my head too. All the time.’

  ‘What was it about her you liked?’

  Tidy, kind Mr Knox
in his crisp, white lab coat. Jimmy hadn’t thought about him for years. Trying to recall his face now, he conjured an image of a man who looked rather like Roger Dunbar. Bloody hell, he thought, did he have a type?

  ‘I’m not sure. It was a long time ago now.’

  ‘But you’d describe any sexual feelings you had as a teenager as normal?’

  ‘I think so.’ Normal could mean regular, couldn’t it? Usual?

  Thankfully, Malvern dropped this line of enquiry. ‘And when you think of suicide, what stops you?’

  ‘Mostly other people,’ Jimmy replied. ‘The thought of what it would do to my dad, for example – how I’d feel if I actually could see him at my funeral, how destroyed he’d be. That’s held me back more than once. But I think, if the conditions are right, I’ll probably end up going through with it someday.’

  It was interesting that Malvern obviously felt a lot more comfortable talking about suicide than about sex. ‘Can you explain why?’ he said.

  This was easy. It was as if all his life Jimmy had been waiting for this opportunity to explain himself. ‘For me it’s the logical solution to more or less any problem. When my work isn’t going well, or I’m feeling miserable, or embarrassed or ashamed, the first thing I always consider is killing myself. It’s a constant companion. I try to keep myself ready for when the time comes. Have plenty of options available. For example, when I came in here today, my first thought was, what if you were to prescribe me some pills? Could I use them?’ He laughed. ‘It isn’t rational, is it?’

  ‘You have a disease, that’s all,’ Dr Malvern said. ‘It’s called depression. You’re lucky you came to me, though. A lot of GPs have no idea how to deal with psychological problems. I’m not an expert, but I’ve had some training, and I can tell you I won’t be giving you any pills today.’