A Serious Man
Page 38
‘It’s all a question of rhythm,’ I tell her, ‘how and where you put the words, less the ones you’ve chosen,’ and add, ‘I shall be happy living here, much as I was before Etty fetched me.’
The telephone rings: Matt, half-startled, glances round.
‘You’re looking very well,’ I tell her.
‘That’ll be Etty,’ she says and when Danny picks it up, his tall figure uncoiling from the couch, stooping, dark-suited, to where the instrument lies by his feet, he listens for a while then says, ‘Matt is here, if you’d like to speak to her,’ and adds to her, ‘It’s your mother.’
‘Immensely well. I’ve never seen you looking better. Your work, I conclude, is going well.’
She takes the phone and bows her head, raising a strand of hair from her brow and securing it behind her ear.
‘No,’ she says, and after a murmured enquiry from the other end glances up and answers, ‘Do you want to talk to him?’
When I take the phone the receiver has been replaced the other end.
‘I am,’ I tell her, ‘interned by love. I don’t wish to go,’ I add, ‘to Eastley Hall, nor to the North London Royal. I am quite prepared,’ I go on, ‘to live on my own. A visit each day, or alternate days, or even alternate weekends, should be enough to reassure you. I intend, for instance, to go out shopping,’ and when she says, ‘It appears you’ve been already,’ I conclude, ‘That’s what I mean: I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself.’
She sits, bemused, across the tiny room: a couch and two chairs confronting each other, the latter at right angles to the gas-mantled fire. Bea at one time accused me of loving Matt and Etty and Beckie too much: ‘You are too fond of your daughters: your sons could do with care as well,’ but when I pointed out I spent more time with Kenneth and Benjie, she blithely announced, ‘Time alone will tell.’
‘Aren’t they daughters a father could be proud of?’ I’d tell her. ‘Aren’t they daughters who, despite an inner-city education, have done immensely well, one a financial adviser and management consultant, another a scholar – and who knows what Beckie will become?’ (she about to start at college). All, in any case, I concluded, gifts inherited from her.
Now when I declare, ‘Your mother accused me of caring about our children far too much, supervising your education in those crummy schools without, so she said, a care in the world. Private education – which, she said, would have suited you better – was, I told her, an abuse, not least of a democracy’s primary tenet that education was a right, not a privilege to be purchased by the few.’
‘Isn’t guilt part of your illness?’ Matt enquires – or is it merely, I conjecture, her observation?
‘I’ve forgotten all the parts,’ I tell her. ‘And all the questions and answers, too. Why don’t you pop in in two or three days’ time? Apart from the odd people who want to see where Vivienne died, and come, invariably at weekends, to take pictures, no one calls. I’ll have no one to relate to and if you wish, on the front door, I can hang a notice which says, “Before you go out adjust your dress,” and look in one of the drawings to see if I’m properly attired. No one, otherwise,’ I conclude, ‘would know I was here.’
When she continues sitting there, one booted foot swaying above the other, and Danny, close-cropped, continues sitting on the couch, I reclining in the other chair, I announce, ‘To behave, in the past, in the way I’ve done, isn’t a critique of anyone. Material possessions, to me, have always obscured what it was I wished to do. I’ve never felt so well, for instance, since the day I gave to Bea, and you, everything I had. My only qualm was the damage it might do. But Bea is used to wealth, or was, until her father died.’
I gave away everything I had in the hope that by getting rid of it I would re-vivify my talent: such a simple precept. Initially, of course, I was thought quite mad: I didn’t realise what I was up to: the absurdity of giving up a house worth half a million pounds. ‘You don’t seem happy,’ someone said. ‘The world is bedevilled by material things,’ I told them. ‘I am better off without,’ scrawled, or so she said, in a casual letter to Bea.
“Dear Bella, if only you could see me now.”
How might the fallen rise, etc.
The airship drifted overhead while to the south (seventy-two miles, to be precise) her mother lay in the arm of her lover.
‘Bea and I are now divorced. She has no rights of any sort. My sectioning,’ I add, ‘has been rescinded. I don’t wish Etty to apply for it again, even though she has this psychiatrist and her own G.P., a man called Raynor, at her beck and call. Both are bedazzled by her books, though she only has one to her credit.’
I met a woman novelist once.
‘Each day,’ she said, ‘I write a little.’ ‘Why, in that case,’ I asked, ‘don’t you write a lot?’ ‘A lot would be a little too much,’ she said. I asked her for a date. ‘The plums,’ she said, ‘are not in season,’ (the sea at the seaside, the cork in the bottle).
Jocular: the hieroglyphics.
‘You want to be left alone?’ Matt says.
‘I do.’
‘I’m not qualified to decide,’ she says.
‘Ring up Maidstone.’
‘I already have.’
‘Don’t try Mackendrick,’ I go on. ‘He’d put me inside to prevent me writing the sequel to A New Theory of the Mind, the epilogue of which he wishes to write himself, having pinched, on his own admission, most of it already. “I am an anthologist,” he said when, putting my mental life in his hands, I went to the trouble of pointing it out. What did Maidstone say?’ I ask.
‘He said he was retired and we should consult with his successor, which, as yet,’ she says, ‘we haven’t done.’
‘What have you decided?’ I hastily enquire (like asking Joan of Arc to set herself on fire). ‘Etty,’ I tell her, ‘even as a child, was always an alarmist.’
‘You’ll be all right on your own?’ she asks.
‘My sentiments exactly,’ as I slowly rise. ‘We had an argument before I left. Charlie, Etty and I. Etty was haughty, I was naughty and Charlie was very sad. I’d lost interest, he said, in the things that count. I had no interest, she said, in people. “I’ve got past what you mean by people,” I said. (I am deep inside their minds.)’
After my daughter and my son-in-law depart (offering, the former, to go out shopping ‘to buy anything you want’) I walk, for a while (amounting, I suspect, to several hours), around the house. Danny is saying to Matt as they walk to their car, ‘He has to make his own decision,’ while Matt, waiting for him to release the door, says, ‘What about the doctors?’ (‘Robeson’ and ‘Raynor’ framed on her lips through the reflected light of the windscreen) while, with a cheerful wave, I watch them depart, their vehicle turning from our narrow street, enclosed by irregularly terraced houses, into the broader one beyond.
All is not lost in the Land of Ur, wrote Hiro (people’s motives for doing what they do are never what they seem).
In the back-street kitchen, with its back-street yard and its back-street windows overlooking
a man as cantankerous as I.
‘The peculiar thing is,’ he told Etty when she rang, ‘I left my suitcase on Darton station. My sketchbook and a life of della Francesca, Botticelli and Mantegna are also inside. (What have these three,’ I ask her, ‘in common?)’
The night, alone, with Sebastopol and Corunna Streets adjoining: the sound of music from The Spion Kop thundering through the weekend air: flats on one side, a house on the other.
“He was starting,” Fenchurch wrote, “where he left off (to have no idea where he was going),” lying in bed, the glow from his neighbours’ windows shining in his own. He had done too much: ‘If I love you will you love me?’
‘If you love me will I love you?’
“Such thoughts are reassuring.”
His sleep: on a log, in Ardsley Wood, ‘Would you give up writing and painting if it threatened to come between us (would you give up everything)?’
“I take nothing now but cups of tea (and have done away with alcohol and women).”
The house was falling into ruin: twice the size of Fenchurch’s, it was nevertheless tall and narrow: the ceilings had broken away from the rafters, the stairs come away from the walls; rain, when it fell, poured through the roof: pots and pans, aimed at collecting it, were scattered across the upper floor. It was like, he often reflected, boarding a sinking ship, the swaying of the stairs (the creaking of the timbers), the tarpaulin sheets suspended like sails directing the rain ineffectually to the appropriate containers (the odour of decay and, unless he was mistaken, rats).
Yet Siobhan, alias Mrs O’Farrell (‘Vaughan’ to him and his fellow students at the Drayburgh forty years before) appeared to be above all this: ebullient – a Scottish mother, and Irish father – broad-bosomed, with a lyrical inclination to transmogrify in paint her domestic life, she had remained throughout three marriages, four children and as many live-in lovers (‘my body is worn out, where not with love, of course, with kids’). Blonde, stout, the rotundity of her figure enhanced by shawls and gowns: ‘Where have you been the last few weeks?’ she enquiring, the door having fallen open at his knock.
‘Ardsley,’ Fenchurch said. ‘They’ve been trying,’ he told her ‘to lock me away.’
He went inside to look at her pictures: scenes from her childhood, portraits of her children, one of a husband, two of a lover. ‘My capacity for love is limitless,’ she had often said, ‘yet I never took money from any man.’
A turbulent, troublesome woman, her hair tumbling to her shoulders: pale eyes gazed out from a broadly-featured face, with a full-lipped mouth and red-flushed cheeks which, in the summer, shone like the sides of an apple. Furrows lined her brow over which a fringe fell in a frieze of curls: broad-beamed, broad-hipped, ‘as long going across as coming up,’ she had told him, taking him through to the kitchen: cats sprang off a chair (cat-food – brown and blood-coloured rusks – scattered across the floor). From the cluttered sink she removed a pot, (pans and bowls from a week of cooking, more than the whole he had in his house). ‘Coffee?’ her fingers vivid with colour. ‘So they want you back inside?’
‘I intend,’ I tell her, ‘to put up a struggle.’
‘You can come and stay here, if you like,’ (the smell from the sink, the decaying food, the fissures in the walls, and holes directly through the ceiling, exposing the beams of the floor above).
‘I’m all right where I am,’ he told her.
‘Nevertheless,’ she said, ‘it’s always here if you want.’
Was this the ‘success’ (of failure) he had, in the past, gone on about: was this the antithesis to Vi, the bleach and mogadonsoaked killer? Was this what life was all about: the where not grease – graffiti-streaked walls, the (startling) pictures, pinned carelessly above the stove along with telephone messages yellow with age – a life he could not in any way encompass, or become a part of? This is Vaughan, he reflected, and I really have no place with her: out of chaos, order (her colours, shapes, her belligerent, sketched-in pictures: ‘tactile’, ‘plastic’, ‘relevant’, fine.)
The sister, he had told her, he had never had, not someone he could turn to (her method of support as helpful as a hammer to the head): someone with whom he could celebrate success, the opening out of his life at the publication of a novel, the production of a play, the completion of a picture, events which, with a peculiar wryness, she never, as far as he could ascertain, very much enjoyed.
The greatest moment of his life: when Isabella acceded to those intimacies which, in their final stages, involved the removal of her clothes (and which she, with an intoxicating delicacy, effortlessly assisted). She wasn’t vulgar, by any means, he reflected, ‘her sensitivity and openness of an order I have never encountered in anyone before.’
‘I’ve missed you, the past few days,’ she said. ‘I miss our talks about art No one talks to me about painting, it’s all about men or this bloody house,’ a dribble of dust from the laths overhead.
The vomit from a cat lay in a pool on the table before him.
Having put on the kettle, and set down his pot, she wiped it away with a sheet of newsprint on which she’d idly drawn a head.
‘Do they intend,’ she says, ‘to take you back?’
‘I’ve been put,’ he says, ‘on my best behaviour. No more late-night phone calls to Bea, no more protests in the street, no more soliciting of neighbours’ wives, nor, indeed, of anyone,’ he adds. ‘Or lapses of taste when talking to women. A byproduct of my current disability, which might be likened to despair, is,’ he goes on, ‘I can’t get women, either individually or corporately, into focus. I am, when addressing or merely observing them, whether old or young, thin or fat, degenerate or angelic, driven by a desire to be embraced,’ whereupon, stooping, she places – as he has hoped – her arms around him, a difficult manoeuvre which he only finally eases by standing and allowing her to draw him to her.
His hands encompass her solid hips: his fingers delve at the flesh of her back.
‘This is more like it,’ he sighs as, behind him, the kettle gives out the shrillest shriek.
‘I’d better get the coffee,’ she says and he, releasing her, goes over to the kettle, turning it off and announcing, ‘I’ve changed my mind to tea.’
Picking up his pot, he looks round for another (they are all in the sink) and when she says, ‘I’ve had one, thanks,’ he puts in a tea-bag and pours in the water.
Steam rises in the chilly air: the house, other than by an electric fire, is unheated.
‘Let’s go to the studio,’ she says, he reflecting with any other man she would have said the bedroom.
As he follows her up the swaying stairs – fresh areas of brickwork revealed behind the disintegrating plaster, fresh laths exposed by descending plaster, fresh areas of wall and ceiling stained by damp – these thoughts preoccupy Fenchurch unduly: ‘Isn’t Vaughan, in a unique way, an amalgam of all the women I have known as well as of certain aspects of myself I have protected or concealed in a way which she, within herself, has never felt obliged to? Isn’t she the woman I thought I was working from but, in reality, towards, over all these years?’ recalling the fresh face of the twenty-one-year-old he had glimpsed standing at her easel in the mixed life-room at the Drayburgh forty-five years before: the sturdiness of her figure, the candour of her look (which, despite her three husbands and four children, had never left her): the blueness of her eye, the curve of her smiling, if not laughing mouth, the cascade of curls from her tossed-back head (the fullness of her throat, the amplitude of her breast), the characteristic sway outwards and downwards as she walked or stood, legs parted, at her easel (no decorous jabs or titillations but broad, expansive sweeps of the brush: never anything less than primary colours).
‘What do you think of this?’ as they come into the principal first-floor room which, through a tall, uncurtained window, looks onto the car-parked street below (several streets’ walk away from his own).
The scroll of colour, the streak of paint, the fractured, jagged, vibrant line.
‘Based,’ she adds, ‘on my notion of a woman. One not altogether unlike,’ (she gives a laugh, throat bared, curls cascading to her shoulders), ‘myself.’
‘One of your best,’ he says, his mind not on the picture but Vaughan herself, the angle of her body, the way it superimposes itself against the discarded drawings that litter the floor, a table, two chairs, the paint and crayon-scoured walls themselves, embodiments of plants and figures on the plaster. She was, he reflected, not merely a handsome but a beautiful woman – in a way that all women were to him now, but more so: she exuded grace, she exuded strength, she exuded beauty – to a degree he had, except in Isabella, never experienced in another woman. ‘And this is someone,’ he further reflected, ‘w
ho is perceptibly stiff-limbed, marked – vividly – by her experience as a wife and mother – as three wives, and four mothers: how could I have not noticed her over all these years?’
‘Or this one?’ turning to a section of the wall to which numerous sheets had been attached, aimlessly, or so it seemed, one on top of the other.
‘Like all your pictures,’ he said, realising, for the first time, she dyed her hair and that, unusual for her, she was wearing make-up. ‘When I was first successful,’ he added, ‘I thought I would be besieged by women. When I wasn’t, I felt let down – unaccountably so, in many respects – and, as a consequence, redoubled my efforts. When, with my second success, I met with the same result, I can’t describe the degree – and intensity – of my frustration. Yet, once on with a fresh piece of work, it was quickly forgotten. Now,’ he went on, ‘the work has gone, and my reputation with it. Perhaps the work, which absorbed me so completely, was merely a distraction. I’ve certainly, in the past, made mistakes which can only be described as cataclysmic, and, to that extent, we have a great deal in common,’ and when she said, ‘I don’t see my life in terms of mistakes, nor,’ she continued, ‘failure, either,’ he responded, ‘It’s one of the things I have to give up, or, if not give up, at least control, a disinclination not to talk when neither thought nor feeling warrant it. You see why I frighten people off, not least of all my family.’
When, for a while, she gazed past him to the picture, he suddenly added, ‘It’s what has led to accusations that I have no interest in people: everything is reduced to verbiage. Nothing,’ he concluded, ‘matters any more.’
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ she says. ‘It matters to me,’ continuing, ‘You don’t seem interested, at the moment, in pictures. I can’t blame you,’ and with an aimlessness he had always associated with her, ‘Let’s go back down and get more tea.’
So this is what it’s like, he thought. All these years I never knew: all these years and I forgot. I don’t wish to be shackled to anyone – not wives, not children – not art: the first time in my life I’m free, not merely, he reflected, at liberty.