When Liis died they turned up at the flat, put on music and poured gin. They told him on the spot that he would be allowed a year to grieve and then they would find him someone and they had. There was a photo of a kind and pretty face, and a quote.
I am not merry; but I do beguile
The thing I am, by seeming otherwise.
Raif copied it into a search engine and found that it was a speech of Desdemona’s from Othello. He found another quote from the play and sent it to Helen.
But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
For daws to peck at: I am not what I am.
Helen was touched and impressed. She said so when they met.
It must have been exactly how you felt when creating your profile.
He didn’t tell her that he’d had nothing to do with it.
And you? He asked. Why Desdemona?
I played her once. I was only the understudy but I did go on. More than once.
Raif was still thinking about the quote.
Those lines. They say that if you pretend to be happy, you’ll become so. Is that your philosophy?
My philosophy? I don’t know. Maybe. I chose the quote because it’s a puzzle that solves itself.
That’s what you aspire to be? A puzzle that solves itself?
Why not?
He wondered if he was putting her under strain.
I’m sorry. I can’t help thinking—
Thinking what?
Helen was thirty-five. She’d had a long-running role in a radio sitcom but her part was eventually cut. In the meantime she’d lost her footing, such as it was, in television costume drama. She’d played a series of inert young women, usually the confidante or the cousin who lacked grasp. After some difficult years she was now finding out who else she could be.
She liked Raif’s face but he wasn’t as tall as she’d imagined, and seemed bookish and a bit contrived. Her mind drifted and when he mentioned his wife she didn’t catch the context.
Sorry, your wife?
Yes.
You have a wife?
That’s what I meant by late – my late wife. She died.
Helen could not understand how she’d missed this.
I’m so sorry. I thought you said—
That she was late?
He smiled, pleased with his quickness, and then realised that he’d just made a joke about his dead wife.
My wife died a year ago. And I—
Has there been anyone since?
She said it so gently that Raif did not detect any urgency. All the same, he lied.
No one.
That first winter had been a desperate period and he had drawn a line and was now himself again.
Any first meeting brings with it a chance of renewal. As Raif and Helen talked, they were selecting, reshaping, rejecting and arranging elements of themselves and their stories. They appeared thoughtful and felt refreshed. Helen guarded her reactions to the extent that Raif thought her incredibly relaxed. Talking to her was like being smoothed out and his perception of her softened. Perhaps she wasn’t taller than him after all. He wanted to stroke the bouncy hair that he’d at first judged too girlish, and as she leant towards him he had to pull his gaze away from the deep neckline of her petalled dress.
Like Raif, Helen was revising her first impressions. The death of his wife obliterated minor detail and now she saw him more simply. He was serious and attractive.
What was it like? she asked. Afterwards. What did you do? The next day?
I suppose I carried on. Doing the usual things.
You must have been beside yourself.
He’d watched himself navigate each day, each conversation. Beside himself? Perhaps so.
Helen considered the situation. He’d had a year to grieve and do stupid things and now he would be ready. She was not as calculating as this sounds. So many of the men she’d met online had been just out of, or on their way out of, a marriage. They were always keen to see her a second time but after a few weeks either disappeared or provoked an ending.
You’re just too nice, a paramedic she’d met the year before had said as he slopped beer down the front of her dress in the crowded pub where he’d insisted they meet.
Sorry, what? She couldn’t hear him.
Nice! he shouted just as the noise level dropped. I’m sorry, love, but you’re just too nice!
Every man in the place had turned to evaluate her and she can still see them nodding their agreement. Yup. Too nice.
Not wanting to be called nice ever again, Helen equipped herself to perform sex and was pleased with the effect. She read up about techniques and toys and surprised herself by feeling aroused by descriptions of light S&M. The day after meeting Raif she dared herself to go into a boutique-style sex shop where a conspiratorial young man persuaded her to buy something expensive in coral chiffon, and a black wand with an ostrich plume which he demonstrated by stroking the inside of Helen’s arm. She had to buy it. One day, not yet, she would let Raif see her in chiffon and silk. She would blindfold him, tie him (lightly) to the bed and run the plume over his body.
The flow of people through the city is itself enough to bring about a loosening of feeling. It’s easy to submit, to become a stranger, not far from your own front door. Those who remain in the city believe in change perhaps more than they should.
*
Raif expected his cousins to be pleased when he reported that he liked Helen and had arranged a second date but they were firmly indifferent. They were staying with him for the weekend, which meant using his flat as a place to get ready for a night on the town. Ashley was a police officer, Emily a psychiatric social worker and Jessica a croupier who also tutored children in maths. When they came into the city, they made the most of it.
The cardboard-coloured sofa was strewn with clothes and books, and the coffee table crammed with nail polish and hair straighteners. Raif didn’t mind. The triplets were a concentrated version of everything – three times as much warmth, three times as much life. It suited him to sit in their midst and receive their attention. They interrogated him because they thought it was good for him. He didn’t notice how little they revealed of themselves. For all their chatter, they were reserved. They performed being the triplets and then went off to work or alone out to play. Only on these nights when they stayed with Raif did they go out together.
Do you meet people online? he asked them.
Of course we do, all the time.
But what do you call it?
Whatever we want to.
After he’d been on four dates with Helen, they wanted to meet her. Raif wasn’t ready for this so instead invited them to come to see her in a play that was just opening called The Chemist. It was Helen’s first lead role. He didn’t think it wise to warn her and he made the triplets sit in a different row. She was playing a chemist whose colleague was in love with her. To stop himself succumbing, he introduced her to his wife, who fell in love with her as well. It was finely written and Helen was at her best. The chemist’s intelligence was gloved in a courtly manner and the audience, like the couple, fell under her spell. She pondered nuclei while painting her nails and she always wanted sex.
I think Helen might be just who I’m looking for, Raif announced to the triplets on the way home.
No one responded and so he repeated himself. This time Jessica spoke.
What we mean is she’s the first person you’ve met. What if there’s someone else? Someone better? Why not keep looking?
We look for a lover and then we start seeing them. If you are seeing someone, you must not look. In the city there is always someone else.
*
Raif, feeling more than he had in years, believed that he felt enough. For their fifth date he offered to cook Helen dinner. It was the first time she’d been to his flat. She was surprised by the taupe and cream furnishings. The food – smoked salmon, mushroom risotto – was of similar colours.
Have some risotto, Raif said. It’s delicio
us.
It tasted of nothing but Raif hadn’t expected it to. They ate in silence, smiling at one another in an exploratory way. Eventually Raif stood up to clear the plates and then hesitated.
I didn’t tell you the truth, he said. I mean about before I met you.
Helen’s hand moved to conceal her chest where the chiffon trim, she was suddenly sure of it, could be glimpsed inside the neckline of her dress, and urged him not to say any more. She went to the bathroom, where she discovered that her period had started and the coral knickers were stained with blood. She had no tampons with her and opened the cabinet, surprised to find it crammed with lotions, lipstick, hairspray, scent and an entire shelf of pills stickered with fluorescent warning labels. There was a half-empty box of tampons and Helen gingerly helped herself. Should she tell Raif?
In the kitchen he’d taken three kinds of chocolate pudding out of their packets and arranged them on large plates. He poured on icing sugar and added several stalks of mint.
Those look delicious, said Helen, edging back into her seat as it occurred to her that there might be blood on her dress. It was ridiculous to feel unable to mention it but this man, this flat, the food – everything was so uptight that she was overwhelmed by the fear of making a mess.
Raif had envisaged a dish of tiny and complex delights like the photo in a magazine he’d picked up on a train the week before: chocolate discs, squares and triangles dusted with icing sugar and scattered with mint. The article had been called What She Really Wants and had drawn his eye because he thought it was about sex. It was about chocolate but the idea stuck. The way to get Helen into bed had presented itself. This was the way. Only these puddings were each meant for two people and he’d bought six. They were on offer – buy two packets, get one free – and he’d taken this as an instruction. What She Really Wants.
I seem to have lost my sense of proportion, he said.
Helen laughed so kindly that Raif, too, was overwhelmed. How lovely she was, how understanding! They picked at the puddings before Helen, who’d arrived with the intention of having sex but did not want to negotiate the fact that she was bleeding, said, as encouragingly as possible, that she’d had a lovely evening but was tired and ought to go home. He didn’t offer to see her out and she got as far as the corner before a mighty cramp made her double over and vomit chocolate pudding into the gutter. She’d eaten as much as she possibly could.
At home she put her silk knickers to soak in salt water and was glad to be in her own bed. She forgot how uneasy she’d been and just felt sorry for that sad man in his sad flat. How hard he’d tried to impress her! He’d lost his wife (and his sense of proportion) and made food that tasted of nothing. She could help.
Across the city, Raif put the puddings in the bin. Helen had seemed to enjoy herself and then she’d gone home. He accepted the information that she was tired and felt neither sad nor rejected. He took his pill and went online.
Helen had read about grief and she knew that for a time people blunder about, doing things they shouldn’t and don’t even want to. But they come through it all with new wisdom. So this is what she saw in Raif, who, it is true, had been broken open by Liis’s death and for a while had seen life on grand terms. He has no new wisdom although he knows now that the worst thing can happen and that it can render you unable to feel what you feel.
black mist
Iris came to depend on David to make life interesting, just as he needed someone to do this for. He was at his happiest when pulling back the curtain on some dazzling surprise. On the second anniversary of the night they met – a date she had forgotten – he proposed. I do not love this man enough, she thought, but I will not look at that.
She said yes to David because she was in a life with him already and he did much to enhance that life, leading her into rooms she would ordinarily hesitate to enter. On their wedding night Iris stood, as he asked, before a mirror in their hotel room while he lit six candles and then reverentially undid the buttons that ran down the back of her dress. I have married a man I do not love enough, she reminded herself as he slipped the dress from her shoulders and fell on his knees before her. But perhaps this is as much as I can now love – as he parted her legs and pressed his face against the lace he’d chosen. She observed the scene in reflection and saw herself as he had named her – refracted and brought to shining life. The image in the mirror became how she remembered her wedding night – as something observed.
As he knelt before her, David already knew that there were layers within this person of layers that he could not disturb. Over the years he stopped thinking of her as colour and light. Iris of the strata would be renamed a creature of stone.
*
Three years after the wedding, Iris came to work for the museum. It was the tail-end of a decade of expansiveness and they could afford to send ten staff to a conference in Baltimore. She’d written a paper on the changing approach of conservators to varnished surfaces and was horrified at the thought of having to present it. But she’d never been to America and was keen to see what it was like to be so far away from home. They stayed in a hotel with many floors and meeting rooms, all upholstered to create a neutral hush. The group from London drew together. They refused name badges, sneered at those who joined in, and stayed up late in the bar. Other travellers joined them, including a man who when asked what he did said that he put out fires.
Actual fires or metaphorical ones? asked a confident blonde curator.
Oil wells. Blowouts, mostly, but also bombed oilfields.
The group fell silent as people thought about what to say and then a loud man sitting next to the blonde, who patted her knee while he talked, came up with:
How does that work? I mean, those fires just burn themselves out, don’t they? Nothing to be done.
The fire man didn’t bother to counter this and Iris was impressed. She hadn’t noticed him sift through the women in the group and come to settle on her.
You were so still, he told her later. And so clear.
Like water, she thought.
At two in the morning there were still a handful of people listening to the fire man talk about the smoke that came from six hundred exploded wells when they burned for seven months and how it sat low in the sky like mile after mile of storm cloud, the black mist and the black rain, and how the land also blackened as sand, soot, ash and oil congealed and set like concrete. People had to use torches in the middle of the day.
The fire man looked at Iris while he spoke. It was becoming their conversation. Eventually everyone stood up and started to say goodnight and when Iris and the fire man stepped into the lift they found themselves alone. Iris pressed the button for her floor. He waited a moment and then, with theatrical delicacy, reached out as if to press a button too but held back and mimed the action instead. Iris thought it the cleverest, most graceful proposition she had ever received.
For years afterwards the fire man arose in her mind as a black mist because as soon as they were alone together she had known nothing of her husband or her life at home. She had stepped into another dimension where the act of fucking this stranger separated itself from what it might mean. She had discovered a capacity in herself which terrified and entranced her.
She could not look at what she was doing or, later, at what she had done. She tried but she could not see it. When she got home, David suggested they have a baby. She became pregnant immediately and the black mist cleared.
the little rebellions
When the girls were four and two, David fell off his bike and couldn’t get up. He recovered in a matter of hours but was sent for tests. Scans revealed that he had lesions in his brain associated with multiple sclerosis. He might develop the condition and he might not. He continued to work as sporadically as ever for a series of short-lived design companies. He remained his lazy, playful self but his diagnosis brought a new tone to everything. Iris and the children learnt not to comment if he stuttered or stumbled or went to lie down. There we
re episodes when he lost his balance, his vision blurred or he wet himself, but he always recovered. He called these his body’s little rebellions.
Iris suspected he made half of them up.
Rebellion against what? she snapped one day. Itself?
And she remembered that of course that was exactly what his body was doing just as he punched the air and said the very word she was thinking.
Exactly.
She had been gathering herself to say that she no longer wanted to live with him but she couldn’t think of a good enough reason now. It didn’t help that the house was so small. It had been advertised as a railway cottage and they’d been charmed by the idea of a cottage in the city. What it meant was old and cramped. The double bed took up most of their room and the bathroom was a functional jostle. They took out a loan to convert the attic into a room for the girls. Iris kept half her clothes in the cupboard under the stairs. She juggled bills and mortgage payments, saved nothing and shifted debt around. The house became more valuable every day but all she could see were the cracks that ran across every ceiling. Was it enough to say to David that she wanted him to leave because she was so tired?
She lived with him for another six years, going off to bed each night knowing that he would spend the next three hours online. He would tell her in the morning about the things he’d learnt and the deals he’d found. Once she asked him straight out how much porn he watched and he said as much as he wanted when in truth he rarely bothered.
A spell had been cast. David issued warnings while he cooked about how awful the food was going to be and it was. He’d paint a wall in one sketchy coat, pull up flowers instead of weeds, wash the dishes and leave them coated with grease. Iris would ask him to pick up bread and he’d come home with milk. She, too, lost the will to do what was required. She left teacups wherever she put them down and her best dresses on the floor. When she broke things she put them on the kitchen windowsill among the pots of dead herbs as if someone (who?) would come along and mend them.
In the City of Love's Sleep Page 6