She had spent all day getting ready what they had eaten in an hour or so. And of course the food had taken second place to their talk, with so much to catch up on; although Keith had helped himself hungrily and appreciatively. In her thirties she had resented furiously this disproportion between the time spent cooking and eating; it had seemed to her characteristic of women’s work, exploitative and invisible and without lasting results. She had even given up cooking for a while. These days she felt about it differently. The disproportion seemed part of the right rhythm of all pleasure: a long, difficult and testing preparation for a few moments’ consummation.
Now she used her mother’s rolling pin to roll out her pastry; she kept Keith’s mother’s recipes for Welsh cakes and bara brith. In her tasks around the flat – polishing furniture, bleaching dishcloths, vacuuming, taking cuttings from her geraniums, ironing towels and putting them away in the airing cupboard – she was aware that her mother and grandmother had done these same things before her, working alone in quiet rooms, or with the radio for company. In truth she had had a stormy relationship with her parents, and used to think of her mother’s domesticated life as thwarted and wasted. But she had learned to love the invisible work, the life that fell away and left no traces. This was how change happened, always obliquely to the plans you laid for it, leaving behind as dead husks all the preparations that you nonetheless had to make in order to bring it about.
THE SURROGATE
WHEN I WAS twenty, not all that long ago, I fell in love with one of my lecturers at college. I know this is a very ordinary thing to do. And I know now that the lecturers sigh and feel anxious at the news of yet another smitten girl-child traipsing round moonily after them. They feel anxious and all those other things you would expect, too: flattered and confirmed and a bit stimulated.
His name was Patrick Hammett, and he taught Shakespeare and seventeenth-century poetry and critical theory. I chose all his courses; I made him my interpreter of the whole world. Patrick was tall, with rather bowed shoulders; he was hollowly thin except for a small beer belly nestled in the stretched cloth of his T-shirt above his belt. He wore his thick black hair down to his shoulders, tucked behind his ears. He used gold-rimmed glasses to read but took them off when he was talking and swung them in his fingers, and sometimes dropped them; his eyes without the glasses were deep-set and squinted slightly. In a crowd, in a club, you wouldn’t have picked him out as particularly good-looking. But in the lecture room, sitting with us in the democratic circle of chairs that he insisted upon, his looks were a power, a force that I felt physically, like velvet against my skin. I loved the whitened pressure points that his glasses left on the bridge of his thin nose. I loved the big nervous hands he was always waving in the air, gesturing uncontrollably in accompaniment to his words.
Of course I didn’t have a chance with him. Who was I? I wasn’t anybody. I wasn’t even one of the cleverest in the classes. I wasn’t an absolutely average student either; I was aware that I had a quirky way of looking at things, which sometimes came out as insight and sometimes just left everyone looking blank. Patrick encouraged me. Once, he reminded all of them of something I’d said. —You remember the point that Carla made in last week’s seminar? Another time, after I’d made some remark about freedom of choice in Much Ado About Nothing, he said, —That’s very well expressed, Carla. I couldn’t have put that more eloquently myself. This made me very happy. But I didn’t delude myself. I wasn’t the kind of student who would get a first-class mark. When I tried to put my thoughts down in writing, the dart of intuition that was clear and sharp when it flew into my mind got tangled in something muffling and clumsy. And Patrick’s being surprised sometimes by my penetration didn’t really mean he had singled me out. I didn’t really exist for him, outside that circle of chairs in the lecture room.
In the seventeenth-century poetry seminar he read us ‘An Exequy’, by Henry King.
Dear loss! Since thy untimely fate
My task hath been to meditate
On thee, on thee: thou art the book,
The library whereon I look
Though almost blind . . .
’Tis true, with shame and grief I yield,
Thou like the Van first took’st the field,
And gotten hast the victory
In thus adventuring to dy
Before me, whose more years might crave
A just precedence in the grave.
But heark! My Pulse like a soft Drum
Beats my approach, tells Thee I come;
And slow howere my marches be,
I shall at last sit down by Thee.
I can’t adequately express the effect this poem had on me then. I don’t remember now what season of the year it was, but I do remember that we had the strip lights on in the lecture room in the middle of the day because the sky was so dark outside, navy-blue clouds pressing close to the earth like an artificial ceiling. Little gouts of rain were spitting against the window, and in the gently sloping field outside (the campus was built up around an eighteenth-century house in the middle of an estate farmed by the Duchy of Cornwall) the bullocks, instead of lying down as they should have done with rain coming, were jostling uneasily and heaving up against the fence and clambering on to one another’s backs.
When I look at the poem now, I see that it is the lament of a much older man for a young wife snatched away by death, and that it depends upon a confidence in the resurrection of the body on Judgement Day. I don’t know anything about those things. But at the time I felt that the words of the poem were so immediate and relevant that they spoke to me not just through my mind but through my body. I could hear that Drum; its beating came right up out of the floor of the classroom and shook me through the soles of my feet. I made one of those remarks that didn’t come out well, and nobody took much notice of it. —He longs for her and she isn’t there, I said. It sounded too obvious to need stating. I’d wanted to use the word ‘sexual’ (we were trained to see sexual implications everywhere, and surely in this case I would have been right), but I couldn’t bring myself to be the first to say it. Patrick wanted us to talk about the metaphor of the beloved object as text (‘thou art the book, / The library whereon I look’). For me the poem was Patrick. All its passion, its concentration, I attributed to him. The poem became my intimation of the pulse of his life, from which I was shut out.
He was only seven or eight years older than we were, but we thought his life must be made out of different stuff to the lives we knew. As far as we could tell he wasn’t married or living with anyone. Someone said he had once had a relationship with a student (although they’re not supposed to). That didn’t make me any more hopeful. She had probably been one of the clever ones who got firsts. She had probably been beautiful. I didn’t think I was. My looks (I’m small and blonde with eyes that used to make the kids at school call me frogface) were like the quirky things I said in class. Good on a good day.
I dreamed about him all the time. I don’t mean sleeping dreams, although sometimes he was in those as well. Too many of my waking hours were spent fantasising scenes in which Patrick and I somehow met outside the classroom and our relationship was changed out of distant acquaintance into passionate amour. I was very exacting as the author and director of these scenes in my mind. Nothing must happen in them that was absurdly improbable or out of character. Patrick wasn’t ever allowed, for example, to tell me that he had always loved me, that he had been fascinated by me from the moment I first walked into the lecture room. The scene could begin with no more than a friendly appreciation of an interested student, a teacherly investment in my intellectual development. He might at most be allowed a little stir of vanity at the depth and earnestness of my response to him.
Given these constraints, the journey from the plausible encounter to the moment when he reached out for me could still be travelled in a thousand different ways.(Even in my fantasies I didn’t dare reach out for him, in case he turned me down.) He had to be s
urprised out of his position of friendly neutrality and into a dawning, uneasy recognition of his growing attraction to me, an attraction that he perhaps couldn’t quite rationally account for. The transformation could be precipitated in various ways; these were the only extravagance I allowed myself. Sometimes we would be accidentally stranded by a breakdown in the middle of nowhere, after he’d innocently offered me a lift home from college. Or we’d be caught by a freak storm when calling at a cottage belonging to friends of his to pick up some books he’d lent them. Or he would have to take refuge in my room one night after being beaten up by muggers and left bleeding in the road just as I was on my way home.
My favourite scene was acted out somewhere that I don’t think I’ve ever actually been. I imagined a path through a green meadow. I’m absolutely a city girl and don’t know much about the countryside but of course I’ve visited it. I needed to be clear in my mind exactly how we’d got there. Sometimes it was in the aftermath of some other encounter nearer home. (‘Why don’t you come out for a walk next weekend, and I’ll show you where Coleridge is supposed to have started writing “The Ancient Mariner”?’) Or a whole group of us were out on a college field trip and Patrick and I got separated from the others while we were talking. (Tricky, as the only trip he ever came on was to the theatre at Stratford.) Or he had employed me to do some research over the holidays and then on impulse said he’d like to buy me tea in the country as a reward.
We’d walk down this grassy path and reach a gate, which opened into a wood beyond. At the threshold of the wood the light changed from broad bright sunlight to a secretive and dappled shade. There were rustlings among the dead leaves that spread like a carpet under the trees. It was a place I’d invented for a transition, for the passage over from my life into his, from his to mine. The gate was made of old grey wood washed silvery by the rain, it swung crookedly on rusting hinges. He held it open for me, or I climbed over and he helped me down. Something in the change of light stilled us, made us pause; the wood with its pillar-like tree trunks and its tracery of branches was a cathedral. He was still supporting my weight, or I was cast up against him in some way as I came through the gate or passed him on the narrow path. I could feel the heat of his body under the ragged grey wool of the sweater he really often wore.
I could only really sustain the stories up to this point. After that, his face came closer, he put his arms around me, there was kissing, there was pressing together, and the narrative failed; it lost its sequence. I could – and did – imagine plenty of what happened after, but not in a clear order. It came in a hallucinated muddle. I would try to disentangle it. I’d return again and again to the gate, the threshold, the movement with which he reached across the distance between us. I’d start again from there. But it was no good. The dream beyond that point was a stuck film repeating itself. Exhausting, after a while. Dispiriting. Because in truth it was nothing at all.
In my second year I was so short of money that I got a job working three evenings a week at a pub in town. It must have been an old pub once, with lots of twisty little rooms winding around the different levels, but it had been knocked through into one huge, cavernous space, low-ceilinged and gloomy. There were still confusing steps up and down in places, and the floor changed from flagstones to boards to carpets; drunks and women in heels sometimes tripped and spilled their beer. Games machines flashing ruby- and emerald-coloured lights stood against the walls. The place didn’t have much atmosphere. It was more fashionable to go to one of the new bars with long pine tables and stainless-steel counters, where food was served; or to one of the old quaint pubs that had kept their little rooms and served real ale. Big parties came to my pub because there was usually room to seat them all. And men came in to watch the football on the TV screens; the kind of men who didn’t want roasted vegetables in pittas or real ale.
I’d worked in nicer pubs. When I lived at home I’d worked in our local, where the old-timers expected you to start pulling their pints the moment they pushed open the door. I didn’t mind the anonymity of this place. I was often on with temporary staff I didn’t know, and that meant I didn’t have to talk too much. If we weren’t busy, I just kept order behind the bar. I made sure that the glasses were clean, the lemons sliced, the drip trays emptied, the bottles in the optics replaced as soon as they ran out, the ice bucket filled.
While I was taking care of all this I forgot that I was a student. I rarely saw anyone from the college in there, students or staff. Then one night when I came back from asking the landlord to change a barrel, I thought for a moment that I saw Patrick. A man with the same long narrow build and thick shoulder-length hair was standing with his back to the bar, a pint of lager in one hand, looking up at the TV screen. Although this was exactly the sort of plausible scenario I was always dreaming up to bring us together, in reality I didn’t want it to be him. I panicked. I didn’t think I could cope with my two roles at once – competent barmaid and besotted student – and I had no idea how to respond when he turned round and recognised me. But the man, when he turned round, wasn’t Patrick, though he did look rather like him. Rather like him but quite different. He had the same crooked nose – more exaggerated, even – and the same close-together eyes that you saw when Patrick took his glasses off. But he didn’t wear glasses. He didn’t have any of Patrick’s concentrated excitement.
He asked for a pint of Stella in an ordinary accent, not like Patrick’s educated one. When I smiled at him and made some comment about the match, he blushed, and I guessed that he was shy, and maybe not very clever. He probably would have liked to keep the conversation going, but he couldn’t think of what to say to me. And I got a certain pleasure out of the situation. It was like a game; I could play at talking to Patrick, without its really mattering, without being afraid of what he thought of what I said. I chatted while I was handing his change over, before I was called away to serve someone else. When he left the pub, fifteen minutes later, he put his glass on the bar and said goodbye to me in such a way that I knew he’d planned it in advance, hoping that I’d be looking in his direction.
I forgot all about him, I didn’t expect him ever to come in again. But a week later he was back, and after that it was a regular thing. He came with his friends, and I really don’t think it was because I was there; they were just a gang who met up regularly and were going through a phase of drinking in this particular pub. But he did remember me, and looked for me when he came in the door, and blushed if I served him. When his friends saw us chatting together they teased him. They made him go to the bar for every round, and then they whistled and laughed to encourage him.
—Go on, ask her, they said, meaning me to hear.
—Fuck off, he said, red-faced, pretending to be busy with the first mouthful of his pint.
Every time I saw him I’d feel the same shock at his likeness to Patrick. People come in physical types; I’ve seen girls I immediately recognised as belonging to the same type as me: small and round with these deep-lidded frog-eyes. There are dark ones and blonde ones, but the type is as unmistakable as if we belonged to the same subspecies. And, even though there were specific points on which they didn’t match, this man and Patrick had the same overall effect. The man in the pub was blurred where Patrick was definite. His skin was coarser. His hair wasn’t as black and straight: it was dark brown, with honey-brown curling bits in it. He was a little shorter than Patrick, but more muscular, as if he did physical work. I asked him, and he said he was a gas engineer, which wasn’t all that physical, but presumably more strenuous than lecturing in literature of the Early Modern period. He had a little beer belly like Patrick’s. His jeans hung on his narrow hips in the same way. Actually – oddly, considering how unlike their lives and personalities were – they even dressed the same. They wore tight V-necked sweaters over jeans, without a shirt. They wore black T-shirts with those little cap sleeves. I suppose they had both found the styles that suited them.
And soon something began that I’m
shocked to think of now. Something that I initiated. It would never have occurred to him even to speak to me, beyond ordering his drinks, if I hadn’t started it. I didn’t just flirt with him. I went all out to make things go further. I knew this was a risky and demeaning strategy; it certainly wasn’t something I’d ever done before. But with him I was safe because it didn’t matter. It honestly wouldn’t have mattered to me if he’d stopped coming to the pub and I’d never seen him again. So it could do no harm to play my game.
If I wasn’t busy I’d watch him from my vantage point behind the bar. Sooner or later he’d become aware of this, and look up from where he stood or sat with his mates, and then I’d smile at him, a long heated-up smile, and he would redden and look away again, smiling too. When he came to the bar I rushed to serve him, even if one of the other staff was closer. He bought me drinks, and instead of thanking him and putting the money behind the bar as I usually did, I poured myself a Bacardi and Coke, clinked glasses with him, and asked him about himself. When I gave him his change I made sure our fingers touched. I don’t think that anything like this had happened to him before. He wasn’t a complete innocent. (I found out that he’d been engaged to someone and she had broken up with him a few months before.) But he wasn’t used to being pursued by a stranger.
The shock of his looking so much like Patrick never completely left me. On the one hand, I felt I had the measure of the man he was, pleasant and rather dull. He and his friends talked all evening about cars and football, and teased each other in the explosive foot-shuffling, flaringup way I remembered from the boys at school; from time to time they’d run out of things to say to one another and sit in silence, taking mouthfuls of their beer. On the other hand, his appearance flashed a promise to me, as if Patrick’s qualities must be locked up inside him somewhere, if only I could find the key to release them.
Sunstroke and Other Stories Page 9