Fairness

by Ferdinand Mount

  It lasted four days exactly.

  Every minute, every second of it was felt separately and yet with a longing for the next one. A year or so later, in a Scrannelogue I heard Scrannel deride some other philosopher, fashionable at the time, who liked to invite us to split up time into an infinity of nano-seconds and ask ourselves what reason we had to think that the next nano-second would follow the one we were now experiencing. This was a futile exercise, Scrannel said, since every instant could be imagined or described only if you knew all about the one before and the one before that, having lived through them, and among the things you knew about them was how incomplete, how pregnant were the motions observed in them: the boot about to kick the ball, the last note of the phrase about to be sung, the glass half-raised to the lips – all these motions could be interrupted no doubt but the impulse to interrupt, that too would be present in the previous second and so on. No, it was not senseless to imagine that the world might stop now in the next instant, just like that, but to imagine such a thing was already to start thinking about the causes of such an event, just as it was if one were to imagine one’s life coming to an abrupt end in sixty seconds’ time (Scrannel had himself only a year or so to go when he gave this little talk and, as I say, his voice, never short on asperity, had already taken on that nasty rasp).

  At first I thought how brilliantly Scrannel had destroyed this sterile fancy, but then I recalled the four days with Jane and how the time had felt just like this, not stretched out but chopped up into an infinity of moments, precarious, unconnected, compact with dread and longing.

  On the surface it was not like that at all.

  Every morning I took Brainerd and Timmy to Monsieur, then I walked back along the road in the sleepy morning sun (there was no mist at all that week) trying not to look as if I was hurrying. About half-way back, Mr Stilwell in his hired Deux Chevaux would come puttering along on his way to play golf and he would wave and I would give him a traitor’s wave back.

  She would be sitting in the darkened room with a fresh thermos of coffee, so that this is what I think of still when I smell fresh coffee. And she would hold out her thin arms as though I had been away for a long time. It was so quick, the quickness was part of the delight, and over so soon.

  We lay like sardines packed on the narrow hard settee. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said and paused, giving me time to say there was nothing to be sorry for. ‘We can’t, you know, go the whole way.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ I muttered.

  ‘John has this condition now, I owe him that much.’

  ‘Condition?’ I asked, wishing I hadn’t.

  ‘It’s a very rare condition, I’m not sure of the medical name for it, but it’s an inhibiting factor, that’s what he told me. He feels really bad about it.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Well, it’s not your fault, but that’s why.’

  ‘I quite see,’ I said, which I didn’t. She had awakened no pity for Mr Stilwell, not then at any rate. Now I feel a certain kinship with those people who have no natural power to awaken sympathy and being dimly conscious of this start actively repelling it, but at the time I felt nothing for him.

  She was relieved to have explained the situation, got it out of the way or into the open or both. All the same, what she said could not help cooling the air. Any mention of Mr Stilwell was liable to have that effect in ordinary circumstances, and here in the darkened room with our pulses beating so fast that it was hard to tell whose heart was whose, his name stopped us flat, so that in a couple of minutes she was sitting upright unscrewing the lid of the thermos and pouring me another cup.

  It was not that our intimacy had gone. We now had a shared secret and, as a result of that, something which could be called an arrangement and when she put her arm round my neck and stroked my damp shoulder under the shirt it seemed as though we had known each other in this way for years.

  ‘Your teeth are white,’ she said.

  ‘No they aren’t. Yours are. American teeth always are.’

  How odd to be talking about teeth. But then what did people in our situations talk about? Their childhoods usually, and so did she. She had been raised in Connecticut in a lovely old house with creeper all over it. The garden ran down to the Sound where they went skinnydipping and it would all have been great except that when she was eight she overheard her father, who was kind of a banker though what he was banking was mostly his own money, say how can I have such an ugly daughter and soon afterwards he was up to a bottle of scotch maybe two a day and having electric shock treatment which didn’t do much for him and she was the only one who could still talk to him because her mother had given up and eventually went off with the little realtor with the hair brushed across his skull who was trying to sell the house, and then he had a stroke in his study though he’d never studied anything in his life, and the money began to go and everything else went too, so she failed to get into Bryn Mawr and went to work in New York, in a little dress shop next to Saks, and then John came along and he rescued them really, all of them, her mother who had been left by the realtor and her brother who wasn’t too bright and her father who was still in St Joseph’s and didn’t recognise anyone now.

  She talked on in her bright jumpy way and I listened, suffused with deep contentment from head to toe, idly watching the sun straggle through the stained glass and on to her pale features with just a little colour still in her cheeks. A few seconds later, I was grateful that we were sitting decorously at the table like this, because the doors blasted open and the doorway filled with Dodo Wilmot, who was so full of news he started speaking before he had got properly into the room.

  ‘Guess what, no you won’t, though I had my suspicions, the whole thing was too goddamn neat. The gendarmes have nabbed your pals. Regardez.’

  And he flung down a copy of Ville-Sport upon the table. Together we leant forward and read: Scandale de la Grand Prix: 3 stoppeurs anglais arrêtés. ‘What’s a stoppeur?’ ‘Chap who stops a horse, must be.’ And there was a fuzzy picture of Cod Chamberlayne, Froggie and Boy coming down the steps of the police station with a gendarme in front of them.

  ‘What a bunch of comedians. Seems they or some buddy of theirs gave Hippo Rossi a bundle to pull Cornichon, and Hippo got loaded and blabbed. Some people just can’t hold their liquor.’

  Dodo was enchanted, he guffawed and banged the table with his huge fist as though applauding some terrific cabaret act.

  ‘But he was riding the horse flat out, wasn’t he, hitting him with his whip again and again.’

  ‘Jane, that con was just belting thin air. If you know the trick of it, you can make it look like you’re riding the shit out of a horse when in fact you’re telling him whoa, whoa, what’s the hurry, où est le feu. I always thought that tip was too good to be true. Still, the money’s in the bank now – well, to be precise it’s in Pingeot’s bank, so there’s no great harm done. We just did our little bit to increase the velocity of circulation of the currency, like they taught us back in Economics One.’

  ‘What will happen to them?’

  ‘Oh Hippo will deny it now he’s sober, say they misunderstood him. There won’t be any other evidence. The vet will find something wrong with Cornichon, burst a little blood vessel, strained his back, something not too serious, nothing the trainer could have spotted. Gus’s friends will get a polite warning and a little encouragement to leave la belle France tout de suite. Hey, what’s up with you guys? You look like a bunch of celery in the moonlight. Nobody’s going to arrest you, Jane, you’re in the clear, you backed the wrong goddamn horse. Come on out and get some fresh air. Jesus but it’s dark in here.’

  And we walked out on the shingle, with Dodo stumbling on ahead of us, cackling and belching with laughter like a schoolboy. I could feel the light breeze ruffle my neck and begin to dry the shirt on my back, the sweet ache at my loins fading now. Beside me, Jane raised her face, letting it draw in the sun and the air.

  That was the second
day.

  The third day we went for a picnic with the boys.

  Jane parked in the corner of a cornfield above a low crumbly cliff with the beach beyond. The soil was rocky, and there were more poppies than corn. The wind was strong, and we moved about looking for the perfect place, but as soon as the rug touched the ground, it began to flap about. We walked on with the heavy baskets until the field stopped and we came to the beginning of a row of villas along the cliff. The first villa was derelict, windows and doors all smashed in, but at the bottom of its garden there was a beaten-up old wooden summerhouse with a verandah and a railing of logs nailed together in a rustic criss-cross pattern.

  ‘This’ll do, it’s out of the wind and there’s no broken glass or anything.’

  So we sat on the verandah of this clapped-out pavilion, looked out at that milky wallowing sea as the owners, who had so carefully nailed PROPRIÉTÉ PRIVÉE above the door, must have done on summer evenings and no doubt thought how fortunate they were and how much they deserved their good fortune.

  I looked down at her, lithe and brisk on all fours setting out the picnic on a red-and-white cloth: pâté, ham, baguettes, tomatoes, Camembert and Anjou rosé for us; Nutella, pretzels, Ritz crackers, strawberry cheesecake, Hershey bars, Pschitt for the boys.

  ‘The man in the shop said this was the best pâté he had. Pâté de grives. I said what’s grives and he made flapping motions so I guess it must be something like a pheasant.’

  The pâté was an evil greyish colour and we took nervous dabs of it on our bread.

  ‘Tastes like old birdshit.’

  ‘Mm so it does. Hey I’ve got the pocket dictionary in my bag. No . . . oh how sad . . . it’s thrushes. Think of all the songs we’ve missed.’

  ‘Must take hundreds of them to make this much.’

  ‘Took thousands of my francs. Let’s bury it. Timmy, Brainerd, we’re going to bury the poor thrushes.’

  ‘That’s yucky. You shouldn’t have bought it if you didn’t know what was in it.’

  ‘Well, do you know what’s in Nutella?’

  ‘Yeah, chocolate, and nuts.’

  I scrabbled a shallow grave in the stony soil and gave the pâté decent burial. After lunch, the wind dropped and the boys trotted off down the field to the low rocks above the beach. We gulped the wine down, quickly as if it was medicine. Our lips were still wet when they touched. The buttons on her shirt came undone as easily as though they were the buttons on mine. Again that double sensation of being at a huge distance, like when you are drunk or semi-conscious and your mind seems to be hovering above your body, and yet at the same time a sense of utter intimacy and intermingling, so that her heartbeat and her trembling might have been mine. With the detached part of my mind, I wondered what I felt or ought to feel for her as a person, and with the other part retorted that we were beyond all that or perhaps hadn’t got that far. Below us, I could see Timmy walking solemnly, processing almost along the bottom of the field with behind him Brainerd holding a large stick. Every few paces, Brainerd would raise the stick in the air and brandish it two or three times. I could not imagine what ritual of humiliation or servitude they were acting out. There was probably more morality in it than there was in the two of us. Her thin sleepy smile had no anxiety or guilt, no whisper of past or future, only the unshadowed present.

  ‘That was in memory of the thrushes,’ she said.

  ‘They deserved a good send-off.’

  ‘They surely did. You all right?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said.

  ‘I’m all right too. I’m trying a little British understatement.’

  ‘You’re very good at it.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to keep it up for long, I’m liable to go over the top, you know.’

  ‘I’ll go with you.’

  ‘Will you? That’s nice.’ We lay on our backs side by side, feeling the dusty slabs of the verandah against our shoulder-blades.

  ‘Oh look at that.’ She stretched out a dozy arm and pointed at a dusty object the size of a grapefruit lying just inside the door of the summerhouse. I got to my feet and picked it up. It was a crude wooden carving of a goblin. The broken jagged base suggested that it had been a knob on a gatepost. Even through the dust and plaster, I could see his sour, disappointed leer.

  ‘He’s a voyeur obviously. Lies in there spying on courting couples.’

  ‘Do you think lots of people come up here for that sort of thing?’

  ‘I’m sure they do,’ I said. ‘They probably book at peak times.’

  ‘How sensible of them. We must come here more often.’

  ‘We must.’

  ‘Can we take him with us? It would be neat to have our own private voyeur.’

  ‘Wouldn’t he get bored with just us?’

  ‘No, he’ll get fond of us.’

  I dusted down the horrible mannikin and gave him a rub with my handkerchief. For the first time, a twitch of melancholy. I put him in the picnic basket.

  And so ended the third day.

  Something about the picnic, perhaps just being in the open air, perhaps the wine and the sensuous ambience of the afternoon, had left me with a scalding restlessness, a kind of impatience that I didn’t know what to do with. At the start, I suppose, our coming together was so startling – to both of us probably – such a windfall that it didn’t need thinking about. But now that simple acceptance seemed inadequate. The thing had lost its innocence if it ever had any. The goblin propped up on the table in my room seemed to be jeering me on. To what? To make something more of it was the nearest I could come to describing the dissatisfaction that had come over me like a rash. All through the long slow dinner – mostly taken up with Dodo Wilmot explaining how he handled mineral concessions in the Third World – the dissatisfaction nagged at me.

  ‘I didn’t sleep, not properly,’ I said the next morning, when we were alone in the darkened sitting-room.

  ‘Nor did I, not a solitary wink,’ she said, looking not displeased. ‘I expect you felt the same as I did.’

  ‘What . . .’

  ‘You know, that we have to talk.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, wishing suddenly never to talk about anything ever again.

  ‘Oh you are so dear. You don’t want to talk, do you? You just want to go on having fun, don’t you?’

  ‘No, it’s not . . .’

  ‘Well all right then. I’ll be your plaything. Tomorrow we can be serious.’

  I wasn’t sure whether she was on the verge of laughing or crying. There was a frantic tremor in her voice which sounded as if some more violent feelings might be unleashed unless I did what was the only thing I knew how to do for her. And although doing that calmed her body, her mind was clearly unappeased. She whispered thank you to me, but there was a touch of irony, irritation, even, about the thanks. And the thanking irritated me too. Oddly enough, though, it was only in these fractious moments that I became fully conscious of what it was that I really liked about her, the awkward zest of her conversation, the way she ran down to the Pari-Mutuel, the way her laconic calm would, quite without warning, break up into raunchy chuckles – all that came clearly into view only when it was under threat, like a hazy landscape that sharpens its outlines when a storm is brewing.

  The mist was there again the next day, Friday. Brainerd was mutinous and whiny, Timmy looked white and tired, sickening for something, but both were sent off to Monsieur regardless. Brainerd talked in a dull undertone to his Action Man all the way along the beach. This neutered mannikin was at present kitted out as a deep-sea diver. Perhaps Brainerd’s undertone was to show that he was talking to someone who was hundreds of feet under water. As I dropped off the boys at the cage, the bars dripping in the mist once more, Brainerd thrust the diver into my hands with instructions to leave it in his room.

  The staircase wound up the back of the house, a dark and airless spiral, smelling of polish and old cabbage. Even when the light was on upstairs at the far end of the landing t
here was still a risk of losing your footing on the narrow treads. As I was going up, there was a brisk clatter of footsteps on the landing above, and she came skipping down the stairs in that eager getting-on-with-things way of hers and ran straight into my arms. I held her tight, the whoosh of her copper hair swirling across my cheek, the deep-sea diver gripped in my hand just visible over her shoulder.

  ‘Hi,’ I said.

  ‘Well, hi,’ she said, and at the same moment that I realised that it wasn’t her I heard more footsteps behind me and twisted my head round to see Jane’s white face peering up at us from the bottom of the stairs, but only for a second because in no time she was gone and I heard the door bang behind her.

  Tucker Wilmot stepped back out of my arms and, not much discomposed, began smoothing her hair.

  ‘It is kinda dark here, isn’t it?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I’m very sorry.’

  ‘No call to apologise to me. But perhaps –’ She pointed in the general direction of downstairs.

  ‘I’ll go and find her.’

  ‘You do that. But I’d wait a coupla minutes. I was just going to fix myself a cup of coffee. You want some?’