by Edward Docx
‘No, not Selina.’
‘No?’
‘No. Selina was never my girlfriend. I mean someone else. She just came in here but I dunno where she’s gone now.’
Madeleine held off for a moment and looked into my eyes. Her beauty hurt my head. ‘Really. And what did she have to say for herself?’
‘She’s a little bit weird actually.’
‘So what did she say?’
‘She said she wanted to come and see me and check that it was OK. That I was OK. That she was OK.’
‘That’s all?’ I mistook her tone for curiosity.
‘Yes. Pretty much. She said she saw Selina’s husband hit me and that I should sue.’
‘What else?’
‘She wanted to … to kind of say that she was better and that she wouldn’t silent call me.’
‘Silent call you?’
‘Ring me up and breathe down the phone.’
‘That’s all she said?’
‘That’s all.’
Madeleine looked at me again. She discarded the cotton wool and undid the cap on her bottle of water. ‘Drink.’
I did as I was told.
‘So what do you mean she’s a little weird?’ Madeleine took back the bottle and poured a drop of water on to the flannel.
‘Ow, that hurts … Christ. Am I bleeding still?’
‘Not much. What do you mean weird?’
‘I don’t know – you know, fragile or something. When we split up, she sort of … lost it, I think. Used to ring me up all the time and not say anything down the phone. She freaked.’
Madeleine stopped. ‘You’re done.’
‘Thanks.’
‘What did you do to her?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Come on, you must have done something. People don’t just freak out.’
‘She was pretty together when I first met her but –’
‘So what happened?’
‘Nothing.’
Madeleine pressed. ‘Nothing? She just went whacko all of a sudden?’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘Give me the short version.’ A metallic note of coercion declared itself in her voice. I felt my remaining dignity veer away but there are no U-turns on the motorway of truth.
‘Lucy thought that I had been with someone else when we were together and I think she was upset by it.’
‘Were you?’
‘What?’
‘With someone else?’
‘Yeah … Yes I was.’
Madeleine’s face emptied and she looked at me for what felt like a long time. ‘You know, Jasper, you should choose the people you plan to hurt even more carefully than the people you plan to love.’
21. Song
Sweetest love, I do not go
For weariness of thee,
Nor in hope the world can show
A fitter love for me;
I survived it, though, the ball of beatings and despair, of women and blood. And as far as Madeleine was concerned, there seemed to be nothing further for me to worry about vis-à-vis Selina, or Lucy, or anyone else. None of it was mentioned again. Nor did Madeleine alter in her attitude towards me. As far as my previous life went, she appeared relaxed. All that seemed to matter to her was how I behaved now, and that she was comfortable in my company and I in hers. As for me: increasingly, disconcertingly, I was finding it difficult – or too depressing – to imagine a time without her. I was aware, whenever I stopped to consider, that somewhere in the corridors of my mind a decision was forming.
A few days after the weekend of the ball, in August, she went away – back to Jordan to do some more research in Amman. Almost straight after that, she was off again, to America – something about a crayfish festival in Sacramento, she said, for the Sunday Times. We were together for just a single extended weekend between these trips – though still my memory of the summer seems like one long liaison punctuated only by the necessities of work and sleep. I find it hard to believe that we spent so much time apart.
I, too, worked hard during August – seven-day weeks, ten-hour days and longer, racing through ‘The Curse’, ‘The Triple Fool’, ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’ and ‘Twickenham Garden’. At last, I felt I was gaining a glimmer – distant, faint, infrequent – of what The Songs and Sonnets were really about.
My Bâtarde was also becoming quicker and more certain; however, as my confidence with the quills continued to grow, I began to find it necessary to take care not to stray too far from the slightly more stilted style of my work on the earlier poems. I hung ‘The Indifferent’ and ‘Air and Angels’ on the wall beside my board so that I could bear their overall composition in mind and ensure a better unity to the work as a whole. I was pretty sure that all thirty of the poems would be displayed in the same place and – despite everything – I remain committed to the principles of artistic coherence. Someone has to make a stand.
Madeleine never contacted me when she was abroad – after all, as she said, she was working, and nobody sends postcards home from the office. But that Thursday night in the middle of August, when she returned from the Middle East, she rang me as soon as her flight had landed and came straight round to Bristol Gardens from Heathrow with her undersized suitcase and her laptop.
The weather wasn’t particularly summery – so we ignored London’s muggy solicitations and declared an end to the discover-the-city regime of July. On Friday, she dashed home for a few hours to make some calls and catch up with the progress of her renovations while I did her washing and coaxed the launderette into a twenty-four-hour turnaround for her more sensitive fabrics. Saturday was a reprise of our most lazy July days. But in the evening I stirred myself and prepared an excellent monkfish with thyme while Madeleine had one of her epic baths. Then we sat down to watch the flickering horror of Saturday night TV.
Or rather tried to. Truly, seeing is believing: for twenty minutes we suffered the presence of some rictus-beaked, thirty-something TV-bubbly bottle-blonde – nose job, tit job, lips job, hair job, face job, feet job, all over body job and still looking like a sack of sickened shallots – who was conducting a disastrous interface between two contestants (dragged blinking and gurning and burping from the studio audience) as a prelude to … what? It was hard to tell. As a prelude to something like their winning a new home with round-the-clock garden makeovers thrown in and ongoing interior design rethinks and a famous chef who cooked boiled eggs in the kitchen step by step and new hair-dos every night for mum and the kids and live-in décor consultant and undercover neighbours who were really more TV celebrities and a permanent patio redesign expert and Christ … who knows whither the cathode ray will Pied-pipe us next?
By nine, we could take it no more. The wine was finished, and sensing the urgent need for a mood change, I suggested some cocktails.
‘You want a pink gin?’
Lying with her head in my lap, she twisted round to look up: ‘What’s that?’
‘Gin and Angostura bitters – more or less.’
‘Sounds horrible. Let’s give it a try. I always wondered what you used Angostura bitters for.’
‘Oh, it’s OK if you’re in the right mood.’ I tried to rise and go to the kitchen but she caught my legs between hers and dragged me back.
‘You’re trapped,’ she said, pulling out the television remote control from under her. ‘Do you know where Angostura is?’
‘No.’ I thought a moment but no information came. ‘Sounds like Tibet or Nepal or something. Somewhere where they make wool or keep goats?’
‘Loser. Wrong continent altogether: it’s in Venezuela – on the Orinoco river.’ She released me. ‘Get into the kitchen, ignorant slave.’
When I returned, carrying the two glasses, she was standing by the open window playing with my mint plant. I passed her a drink.
‘So is there anywhere you haven’t been?’
She looked at me reproachfully, as though to ask such a question of a traveller was in some way
to deny the vastness of the globe and by implication the longevity of her career.
‘Of course. Hundreds of places: the Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Alaska, Uruguay … I mean, literally hundreds of places. Afghanistan.’
‘What about in Europe?’
‘Again, yes. None of the Baltic States – Estonia and so on. Not Poland. Not really Portugal, not Lisbon anyway. Not Turkey or Cyprus or Sardinia or … lots of places – Rome in fact, and Malta and Jesus – even Mon—’
‘Rome. You haven’t been to Rome?’
‘No. Never.’ She took a sip and sucked her teeth. ‘Nice. I like this drink.’ She licked her lips. ‘Is this the window where you used to spy on me?’
‘No. I used to do that from my studio.’
She nodded, slowly. ‘It’s very romantic.’ Her tone was only half joking. ‘My fingers smell of your mint.’ She offered me her hand, which I kissed. ‘But of course it’s all the wrong way around.’
‘What do you mean?’
She studied my face a moment. ‘You writing love poems at your window while I bask in the garden below.’
‘How so – the wrong way around?’
‘Well, I should be up at the window and you should be down in the garden walking melancholically – is that a word?– walking melancholically back and forth beneath my window as you write. Like a true Renaissance man.’
‘Oh, I get you.’ I crossed to find some music. ‘Except that I can’t write sonnets very well and we don’t live four hundred years ago and anyway, they’re not exactly love poems.’
She slurped her drink childishly. ‘Christ, Jasper, you’ve come over very grounded all of a sudden. What’s happened?’
I crouched down to look at the covers of my discs. ‘I’m sorry. I’m changing uncontrollably. My inner Don Quixote is slowly passing away. I think it’s the male menopause. Although Roy Junior reckons it’s to do with eating too many fish. It’s making me more normal … nicer apparently.’ I rocked on my haunches. ‘I’ve started regretting sleeping with other people’s wives and I’m even considering arranging my music alphabetically – or maybe by date of purchase – or composition.’
‘You are right, though.’ She came over and stood directly behind me, pressing alternate knees lightly into my back.
‘I know,’ I sighed. ‘About what?’
‘They are not really love poems. I’m catching up with you there. I read the copy you gave me, by the way, when I was in Amman, when I got back to my hotel. Quite a few times, actually. They are so … so dense – like puzzles. But better than going to get hit on by horrible fat guys in the bar. Although now I feel strangely like I’ve been hit on by Donne. Which is weird. He wasn’t a horrible old fat guy, was he?’
I began the process of putting all the discs back in their cases – a task which Madeleine seemed congenitally incapable of performing. ‘No. Not as far as I know. He was a thin guy. Normal build. But very popular with the ladies.’ I took Schubert from the cradle and replaced him with Madeleine’s Billie Holiday. ‘Maybe later, after he got himself snookered by his marriage and his kids and religion and all the rest – when he was Dean of St Paul’s – maybe then he started putting on weight. People do that when their circumstances get the better of them – it’s a way of cancelling themselves out sexually. But I don’t know. Maybe he was lean all the way through. He certainly never gave up taking the fight to God or being fucked off with his fellow man.’
‘I think he stayed thin.’ A change of knee. ‘So what are they about, Jasper? Now we’ve agreed it’s not love?’ She gave the word a heavily sardonic inflection, which nevertheless failed to deflect the sincerity of her enquiry.
I stood up and faced her. ‘Honestly – I still don’t know. It’s not exactly not love either. The problem with Donne is that everything is about everything all the time. Or rather, everything is inside everything else: faithfulness, unfaithfulness, faithfulness, unfaithfulness; truth, falsity, truth, falsity … there’s what he might call “a plaguey subtlety” about everything that he writes.’
She mocked me: ‘A “plaguey subtlety”?’
I ignored her. ‘It’s from one of his poems. He’s talking to himself, as usual: “But thou which lov’st to be / Subtle to plague thyself / Alas –”’
‘So what’s his problem?’ she interrupted. ‘Women?’
‘Not women specifically – although nobody is underestimating the amount of trouble women can bring to any situation. More, I think, his problem – if that’s what you want to call it – is something to do with “possession”.’
She collapsed over the end of the sofa, holding up her drink to prevent it from spilling before settling properly, folding her legs under her as she had done the first time she came round.
I sat down beside her and put my feet up on the little table. ‘Once something is apprehended, possessed intellectually, then it’s no longer vitalizing for him. And that goes as much for, say, religion or travelling to a foreign country as it does for women. Most of all it goes for the experience of writing the poems themselves. Sometimes you can feel him not engaging so much with their endings because once he’d got enough of them down on paper, that’s them had. It’s a possession aversion.’
‘Is it? I didn’t read them – or, I should say – I didn’t experience them as being about possession.’
I considered. ‘No, in a way you are right: that’s not what they are about. That’s more what they – I don’t know – what they enact. What they are about is … something to do with vicissitude, mutability. You might say that what really animated Donne more than anything else was inconsistency: in the world about him, in the women he met and, most of all, in himself. But there is a lot of straightforward love there too – especially for his wife.’
‘Who was she?’
‘Ann. He married her in secret, thinking he’d get away with it, but he misjudged the reaction of her father and totally fucked up. She was out of his league – different social rank – and he was fired when he came clean and they had to go and live in penury in a damp little cottage miles away from London … miles away from all the action for years. But when she died, he wrote that he was dolore infans – by grief made wordless –’
‘A sad thing for a poet to say. How old was he when he got married?’
‘Twenty-nine, I think, or thirty.’
I think more clearly during the night – perhaps because the darkness and the silence are closer to the true nature of the universe. The stars – our juvenile sun included – are all just local distractions of light, heat, noise, hardly worth counting against the vast spaces in between. But at night you can take communion with a deeper truth. You can make decisions.
The chronic inattention that so many people pay to life also strikes me most at night. As if the living of it could ever be enough. ‘Oh,’ they say, with that facile glibness of the self-appointed wise, ‘but all the most important decisions are made for you.’ And yet this is only another form of cowardice or evasion. Because, in truth, all the important decisions are yours and yours alone. There is no God, no justice, no externally verifiable right or wrong, and you cannot blame your parents. (They had no idea what they were letting themselves in for.) No – against the screaming chaos of all those hell-bent genes inherited from all those unknowable ancestors within, and against the vast and silent indifference of the universe without, you, and you alone – expecting no reward and certain only that death is coming – must choose your ridge and make your stand. The alternative is a wretched slavery: to be pushed and hustled and nudged and shuffled through muddy valleys into a series of positions that you did not mean to take by people whom you did not intend to love. To become, in effect, nothing more than the breathing aggregate of all your failed intentions and ducked decisions. At which point chronic inattention is the only recourse.
And if there was a single night, a moment of election, then it was that night in August. We stayed up late – talking, drinking, doing nothing. At three or four,
I was still awake, lying beside her as she slept. I remember the weather was distracting, falling over and getting up again outside the window like a toddler given whisky as a joke. My decision wasn’t loud or resounding – but rather cautious and mute – a change in the way I thought about her, a change in the way I thought about myself. But that, I think, is what love is: an unknowable risk taken in the darkness during unsettled weather. And anyway, I had been meaning to see grandmother for ages.
Of course, on the Sunday, when I awoke and there was light in the room, and she was turned the other way, her hair on the edge of my pillow, her shoulders small and almost frail, and outside I could hear the agonized whirr of a builder’s stone cutter … of course, when I awoke there were other, more facetious voices: ‘Oh pul-lease, Jackson. Will you leave it out with your dumb-ass questions? Surely we don’t have time for that stuff any more? I mean come on. The human race is much too fast these days for such enquiries of the soul. Sure we can stop for inner calm work-outs with our New Age buddies if we really must; or, hey, who knows? – maybe a cup of self-conscious green tea twice a day just like they used to in ancient China. But as for the serious stuff – the nature of Love – or, for Christ’s sake, any of the love poets – well, fuck that. Fuck them. No chance. Not now, Jackson. The rest of humanity is pumped up on steroids, pal, and on a special no-food diet and there is absolutely not time for you to be hanging around the side of the track asking bullshit questions like that. This is a race. Get set. Get involved. (And make some money, for fuck’s sake.) ‘In love’: who on earth has any idea what that means?
‘(A) As far as you can tell, do you sort-of like your partner enough to ignore the tiresome, underlying truth of his/her personality? (B) Can you remember thinking that he/she is sweet now and then – when he/she brings you presents, for example? (C) Is he/she more or less as nice/acceptable as anyone else you may have met or are likely to meet; and do you seriously doubt that other people would have the stamina to put up with your raging insecurity and ferocious ignorance? (D) Is the physical attraction marginally above the generic appeal that you feel towards members of the opposite or same sex? (E) Are you shit scared that you’re not going to meet anyone else?