A Personal History of Thirst

by John Burdett

  I lay breathing shallowly, so as not to disturb the moment, while something at the top of my head was exploding with happiness. Her eyelids fluttered; she opened them and closed them, raised her head slowly to look at me, smiled.

  “That’s the best sleep I’ve had in years,” she said.

  “How many years?”

  She stroked my cheek.

  Later, I made coffee and phoned my clerk to tell him that I would be working at home that day. By the time I returned to her with the coffee, the smile had given way to a frown.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know if I should be here.”

  “Aren’t you happy?”

  “That’s the trouble. I don’t deserve it. What kind of woman am I?”

  “A beautiful, generous, witty, sexy woman.”

  She allowed her blue eyes to dwell on my face for a moment. “Have you really forgiven me?”

  “I’ve really forgiven you.”

  “And you love me again?”

  “You know very well I never really stopped.”

  “And that justifies everything?”

  “Everything.”

  “Supposing everyone was like that?”

  “Then the earth would shine like the sun.”

  She puckered her brow. “What’s that a quote from?”

  “Les Enfants du Paradis—you remember?”

  “I remember it all. That’s the trouble.”

  A moment fourteen years before in which Jean-Louis Barrault had begged Arletty to stay and Daisy and I had loved each other in a cinema in Camden Town inspired me to eloquence. “Well, where else would you go?”

  In the event, the case was easier to win than I had expected. I had supposed that she would fend me off with the inevitable “Let’s wait, James,” but like me she seemed to be aware that when you’re hurtling toward forty there is no longer that much time. By midmorning I had persuaded her to live with me again. It was to be a temporary arrangement, of course. Like life. She dressed and paused, waiting for a cue.

  “There’s no point in delaying. Let’s take my car and load it up with your things this morning.”

  “This is the first day of the rest of your life,” she quoted in a New York accent. “What about the police? I’m sure they’re watching my apartment. Won’t you be compromised?”

  “Not by collecting your things. Any compromising was done yesterday when Holmes and his sidekick came calling. Don’t worry, I won’t suffer because of you.”

  I led her the short distance down the street to the lock-up garage I rented. Hampstead is all double parking, herbal remedies and stone-ground bread, cute lanes with secondhand bookshops and a pub on every corner, a temple of mellow quaintness. It is also a ghetto for misfits. When all was said and done, she was, like me, a born outsider, and as her fine hair caught the sun and she smiled at me, I fancied that she had come home.

  Then I opened the garage door and she saw the car, a brand-new black Jaguar, with a space-age dashboard. A desperately expensive toy for a man desperately trapped in bachelorhood. It was exactly the kind of car he would have bought.

  “Jesus, Jimmy.”

  “I know.”

  I remembered not to open the passenger door for her, but when she was seated showed her how to adjust the position electronically. Reversing into the street, I flicked the stub gearstick around with defiant panache.

  She sat with her seat belt across her dead center in the passenger seat—as if afraid to touch the sides of this engine of evil—and began to giggle.

  “What?”

  “Thousands of horsepower, dozens of fuel injectors, holds the road like a racing car, and you still drive like an old lady in a Morris Minor.”

  I was pained, then amused. It was quite true. I’d developed the bookworm’s ineptitude when it came to physical objects, combined with the coward’s fear of them. Electric drills, screwdrivers, staplers, motorcars—they all turned clumsy and rebellious in my hands. And yet I’d been a practical lad, before I turned scholar.

  “It’s so dumb, the police even putting you on the bottom of a list of suspects,” she said, “if that’s what they’ve done. Imagine you with a gun.” She leaned over and kissed my cheek. “Any man who drives a Jag this slowly wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  We stopped outside her house, which was in a turning off that end of Elgin Avenue where the grand mansion flats of Maida Vale give way to the sad terraced houses of eastern Ladbroke Grove. Hers belonged to a housing association that had converted it into three flats. She had the middle one. Below lived a woman with four children and a confusing stream of lovers.

  “You know, before I moved here I wouldn’t have believed that such people exist; I thought they were a figment of the right-wing imagination. She’s got pregnant again just to get a bigger place,” Daisy said.

  Above her a West Indian couple held relentlessly noisy parties that began Fridays and went on until Sunday mornings.

  “Make sure you lock your car,” she said.

  “Have you lived here since you left?”

  “Yes.”

  “Four years?”

  “Nearly five.”

  I allowed myself to look glum.

  “I didn’t want to be rescued,” she said. “I wanted to be left alone. I became paranoid about people knowing my address. If I’d received just one more threat of violence, I’m sure I would have ended up in a straitjacket.”

  “I could have kept a secret.”

  She squeezed my hand as we negotiated a barricade of dirty toys. From the top flat, reggae with megabass flooded the little house. Daisy turned the key in her door, and the music seemed to get louder as we went in.

  “I don’t exist; for them I just don’t exist; it’s me who’s the black in this house,” she said when someone walked heavily overhead.

  While she opened drawers and threw things into a bag, I wandered fascinated between the two rooms of the little flat, contemplating the meanness in which she had to live. If wealth means having enough money to buy what you want rather than what you need, then I had been wealthy for some time. It had crept up on me. Daisy’s standard pinewood table and chairs had become my oak antiques, her posters of Haywood gallery exhibitions, my expensive copies and one original, her blankets my duck-down quilt. As she marched about, angry and embarrassed at the deafening music, I looked on her flat with the eyes of a snob and at the same time was conscious of a certain unlovableness about my own house. I was thankful that she had kept no visible memento of her life with him.

  “Didn’t he give you any money at all when you split up?”

  “We didn’t split up; I left him. And how could I accept that money, even if he’d offered?”

  When she’d finished packing, she took me aside to show me something in a piece of aluminum foil. It was a small lump of hashish.

  “Better chuck it, I suppose. I’ll have to give it up soon anyway, won’t I?”

  “No, bring it. I want you complete, all vices and virtues intact.”

  I received a grateful kiss, but she threw away the little piece of foil.

  We hauled two cheap suitcases and a backpack down the narrow stairs and over the toys. Outside, I was only half surprised to find George Holmes waiting on the other side of the street, his hands thrust deep into his Burberry, trilby pushed back on his head.

  I had detected no police presence while driving up to the house. He’d always known how to run an efficient operation. His old Rover, not in evidence when we arrived, was parked down the road, so he must have given instructions to be contacted when we showed up. I could always demand to know what he was doing there, but that would have been demeaning for both of us. I endured his stare while we put Daisy’s luggage in the boot of the Jag and drove off.

  “He’s the cop who came to see me last week,” Daisy said.

  “George Holmes. I mentioned his name to you once years ago.”

  “So what was that all about?”

  “It was a warning. H
e thinks one or both of us are making a fool of him, and he’s angry. George Holmes angry is a dangerous man.”

  “Why would he be angry?”

  “Because he used to like me, and admire me, and because he feels cheated by Oliver’s death, and because he’s a man with a mission.”

  “What mission?”

  “Oh, the usual ‘clean up the city’ sort of thing. I’ve often heard him rage about drugs destroying the minds of innocent children.”

  Daisy colored. “I told you I never accepted any of Oliver’s money after I left.”

  “I don’t think that would impress George.” Even to myself I sounded like a moralist in a soap opera.

  “I’m not sure this is such a good idea,” she said, but she didn’t tell me to turn around. Then she said, “George Holmes—isn’t he the one who gave you my phone number?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why would he be angry about us meeting?”

  “I think he expected me to do it all over the phone.”

  “All what?”

  “All our talking.”

  She buried her fingers in her hair, pushed back until her hands were over her ears. “He’s tapped my phone, and I am a suspect?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “And he wanted you to trick me into saying something?”

  “He’s a sly man. Who knows what he really wants?”

  We had turned a corner, but she looked back anyway. “He looks so straight.” Her hands were shaking, her cheeks were suddenly blotchy.

  I intended, as soon as she unpacked, to tackle her about the photograph George Holmes had given me the day before: Daisy in plastic earmuffs taking aim at a firing range with a small pistol. But before I could bring it up, she raised a question of her own.

  “Jimmy, don’t be angry about this, but there’s something I need to know. It’s ridiculous, I’m sure, but that policeman seemed to be looking at you, not me. I can’t pretend that part of me isn’t relieved that Oliver’s dead, but if you had anything to do with it I couldn’t live with you, I couldn’t be your lover.”

  I stared at her. In view of the photograph, it was a strange thing to say.

  “You read the newspaper report,” I said. “The killing had all the signs of a professional assassination. A single shot between the eyes with a small-bore handgun taped in all the right places to avoid fingerprints and left at the scene of the crime. As you used to point out, I can hardly wield a hammer. Whoever did it has had plenty of target practice.”

  Daisy Smith blushed deeply and changed the subject.

  6

  We had a long moment of conjugal bliss, Daisy and I, before George Holmes came back. Although I said nothing to Daisy, I guessed that time was short for one of us and canceled all my appointments. For two weeks we hung suspended between crime and punishment, and I found that the wild strawberries tasted all the sweeter for that. Despite the knowledge that her telephone had been tapped, Daisy seemed blissfully ignorant of the legal machine that, I was sure, had been cranked up and was even now making its slow, relentless progress from somewhere in Scotland Yard, across London, and up the hill to Hampstead.

  It amused me, how quickly Daisy grew used to living in my house and driving my Jaguar. She continued to complain about the car’s ostentation but confessed to reluctantly falling in love with its comfort and power. She was more of a natural driver than I. She would drive around in it for hours to soothe her nerves.

  She had changed. Did I say that she had not? It’s true that when she first came through the door of my house that Sunday after he died her observations seemed like an echo from the past. But like most good entrances, it was largely bluff. Eleven years is a long time in sexual politics.

  The passionate convictions of her youth had formed, in the end, a set of off-the-shelf opinions to be handed out to strangers: this is who I am so far as you’re concerned. In fact I noticed after the first day or two of awkwardness that her own opinions bored her. She would stop in midsentence and sigh. More than once she said, “I don’t really know anymore.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “I spent a huge part of my life feeling resentful. I’ve broken with all my friends, my affairs with men have all been a disaster. At the time I always blamed the others. Now I wonder. If this is a chance, a real chance to get something right, then for God’s sake let’s please do it.”

  My back gave me trouble from time to time during the day, especially now that I was indulging again in sexual athletics. I caught Daisy staring as I put my palms to my lumbar region to ease the ache. This and other evidence of Thirst’s impact on our lives were all around us, like unexploded bombs. By unspoken agreement we never mentioned any of them. Daisy carefully massaged the muscles of my lower back without murmuring, as she might have done, “So it’s still giving you trouble after all these years?”

  By the fourth day of her staying with me we had both made the discovery that we were neither the people we had been more than a decade before nor the people each of us had presumed that the other would become. With some glee I revealed that I had a small but active circle of friends who had helped me survive the last decade.

  “You’re not such a loner anymore, then?”

  She, on the other hand, had become a loner.

  “I went through a period—maybe three years—when I didn’t trust anyone. Neither women nor men.”

  “Fancy you being the antisocial one. You used to make me feel like a social defective.”

  —

  That she had been damaged was painfully clear. She took innocent questions as a challenge, something she had never done before. She had no objection to being alone in the house, even welcomed it when I went for walks on the Heath by myself. But she disliked going out into the street on her own. She reminded me in an odd way of ex-convicts—hyperalert to threats both real and imagined, eyes that darted at innocent words. Although it was not obvious at first sight, intimacy revealed a history of physical damage too. Fingers were crooked that had been straight, there were strange scars under her chin. Had I not known the answer, I should have said something like, “What monster did this to you?”

  On the fifth day she burst into tears again in my arms.

  “He’s dead, Daisy, it’s over.”

  “That’s why I can let myself cry. Oh, James, I can’t believe this—it’s too good; life isn’t supposed to be like this. It’s making me paranoid that something will go wrong. Tell me nothing’s going to go wrong.”

  I swallowed. “Nothing’s going to go wrong.”

  “But it’s so hard to take—that our happiness should follow from someone’s death. It’s like some American cops-and-robbers show—a bullet in the right place solves everything. I was expecting to feel wretched and guilty for the rest of my life.”

  Sex became a frequent and indispensable retreat, a warm safe cave into which we would crawl to recover from the unaccustomed discipline of sharing another’s state of mind. When we made love, at least, we were both in the same mood.

  “We’re doing this more often than we did as kids.”

  “I’ve got a lot of time to make up for,” I said.

  “I can’t believe you haven’t had a woman for all those years. It’s downright—”

  “Morbid?”

  “Darling, don’t give me your lecture on the loss of integrity in modern life, please. I haven’t had a man for years, actually.”

  There was something about the way she said it. “Does this mean I’m going to have to hear about your de rigueur lesbian affair?”

  She smiled. “Poor Jimmy, you really are a lone warrior fighting against the twentieth century. It’s not all bad, you know. Yes, I did have my de rigueur lesbian affair, as you put it. I needed love, was incapable of trusting a man, so I tried a woman. Which was dumb of me—I mean to suppose that woman as a species is genetically more reliable than man. I discovered that people who feel incomplete will betray you sooner or later—they have no choice. And since most of us are
incomplete, most of us are also treacherous. I also discovered that I’m incurably heterosexual. That magic stick of yours is indispensable to my well-being, so please don’t start a sulk—it always used to shrivel when you sulked.”

  “I’m not sulking. Really.”

  “If it makes you feel better, there’s one thing I do agree with you about.”

  “What’s that?”

  She smirked in the old way. “Tastes awful.”

  The implication that I had completely deprived myself of that voyage of self-discovery that usually involves some combination of promiscuity, mysticism, drugs, and a visit to California finally prompted a confession.

  “Of course there have been other women—I said I’d never loved another, not that I’d never had another.”

  “Tell me. I’m interested.”

  I told her, and in the telling made it sound more glamorous than it had been. Almost exactly once a year for three months I would find myself having an affair with a woman who saw my emotional frigidity as a challenge. The number of times I was called a brick wall or its equivalent was painfully telling.

  “They all fell into a mold—hot chicks on the surface, desperate for love and babies underneath.”

  “I feel sorry for every one of them. Fancy falling for you in your implacable phase. I know what it feels like: it feels like being a ripe peach flung against a—”

  “Don’t say it.”

  “But tell me—wasn’t there one, just one, who grabbed you by these just a little bit more firmly than the others?”

  “Yes, I suppose there was. It was quite early on, actually, only a year or so after we split up, you and I. She went to live in Australia. She was more perceptive than the others; when she left, she said, ‘I love you, but not enough to spend the next ten years trying to heal you.’ Horribly accurate in the circumstances.”

  “Do you want to hear about my adventures?”

  “No, thank you.”

  In the only sense that matters, I knew exactly what she had done and the kind of people with whom she had done it.

  —

  I had changed more than I had realized, as became clear after the first few steamy days of bed and breakfast. For one thing, our bodies were not capable of carrying quite the same mythical charge they had carried a decade before. I could still adore her soft breasts and silken thighs, but they were no longer indistinguishable from God. Her breasts and backside, though still pretty, had sagged slightly. And her thighs, though still soft and yielding, were, despite a fascist regime of cottage cheese and diet biscuits, amusingly chubby. She feared the onset of varicose veins in both calves.