Gravity's Chain

by Alan Goodwin

  Never was a woman more aptly named. She’d housed university students for twenty years and the house, and its contents, were unchanged since the first lodger took up residence. Every scrap of colour and every vestige of fun were long drained from the place, just like her pale, tasteless vegetables, which had been boiled to buggery. Mrs Grey, everyone called her Mrs Grey, not only had an aversion to vegetables that might offer the merest resistance to a strong set of teeth, she also had something against heat. The front room, small and overpopulated with heavy threadbare chairs, had a wonderful fireplace, but fire never adorned its splendour. Occasionally when it was a ‘bit chilly’, which for Mrs Grey meant either snow or frost so thick it had to be chipped from the front path with a shovel, she put an electric bar heater on for half an hour. The heater had two bars, but one was broken and the one that worked only got an orange glow along three-quarters of its length. Ali and I learnt to live in four layers of clothing. We became well practised in the art of manoeuvring and eating with arms hardly able to bend. Some nights the sound of Ali’s teeth chattering kept me awake. Poor Ali, how must he have felt coming from Cairo to Great Chesterford? I had enough trouble even if she was slightly more recognisable to me from my visits to Grandmother’s farm.

  Ali was on the same physics course as I was, though we hadn’t spoken in the two weeks before we moved in with Mrs Grey. We became friends quickly. This was the first time I’d met anyone of equal intellect. I know that sounds elitist, but that’s how it was for me and how I found Cambridge. I met people every day who understood relativity and quantum theory the way others might understand multiplication or division. I was no longer a freak, always fighting to be accepted as normal; suddenly I was among equals and I could begin exploring the boundaries of my intellect. It was a wonderfully liberating experience and I grew like a limp lilo with a new foot pump: fast and in every direction. Cambridge may have been frosty and cold but already it was my intellectual home. The only thing the place lacked was Mary.

  I flew into a New Zealand summer. Even early in the morning, heat was beginning to subdue Auckland. I saw Mary first, not surprising since I was looking out for her the moment I rounded customs control. We gripped each other, Mary shaking with a sob. Dad shuffled on the periphery, embarrassed at our affection. Finally, after Mary released me, I went to him and we shook hands. He stared over my shoulder at some distant point on the back wall, unable or unwilling to look me in the eye. We walked to his car, loaded up and I said goodbye to Mary, just minutes after greeting her, though we would meet later that day.

  ‘Good flight?’ They were the first words spoken by Dad, who still had that faraway gaze.

  ‘Yeah,’ I lied. I’d worried the entire journey and was sure the arm rests had the indentation of my fingertips on their underside.

  I waited for further comment, but our conversation was done. Even though I hadn’t seen Dad for almost a year, I might as well have just stepped off the bus after being away for the afternoon. Poor Dad, I don’t think he got the Cambridge thing or, to be more precise, I think he chose not to understand. It was easier that way. This was how he dealt with life now. There was a time when he understood, but all that went when Mum left him. Life was much simpler and less worrisome if looked at in monochrome. There was no need for detail any more.

  ‘I expect you’ll go up to the bach sometime, will you?’ he added some hours later as though the intervening time between our first words and these were forgotten.

  ‘Thought I’d go up with Mary, Helen and Mike. Is that OK with you?’

  ‘Should be.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  That was that. Holiday fixed. Well nearly: just before we left, Helen and Mike decided they wanted time by themselves, so they packed a tent and headed south. Mary and I travelled north for a week together before the Christmas and wedding onslaught. It was our first time back since the fateful holiday the year before and our golden moment on the beach. The bach was a mythical place for us now, our private Shangrila where dreams came true. The moment we arrived everything in our lives was how it should be. This was a perfect moment of first love. We sat and watched the sun set, casting an orange glow across the bay and sea. All was gentle, even the smallest flick of surf on the beach. It would be hard to think of a more sublime moment.

  ‘This is amazing.’ Mary propped her legs on the glass coffee table in the middle of the room and sipped a glass of wine. Her body nuzzled into my side and she felt as soft as the picture before us, just as I had dreamt of her as I sat in the cold of Mrs Grey’s front room.

  I merely nodded. Even speaking might doom the moment and break my happiness.

  ‘Can I ask you something, Jack?’

  I managed a grunt, but already I was aware of perfection slipping.

  ‘Don’t be angry.’

  ‘I promise.’ I was immediately on my guard. What dangers lurked in this simple request? I felt her body tense.

  ‘Do you find me…boring?’

  I almost laughed with relief. ‘Of course I don’t. What on earth makes you think like that?’

  ‘I mean intellectually boring.’ She moved away so she could turn to look at me. ‘It’s just that you are so, well, bloody clever and I’m so average. Do you find it difficult, I mean a strain, to be with me? Do you feel like you have to lower yourself to my standards, to my level?’ She paused and noticed my smile. ‘Jack, I’m serious. Caroline said something to me and it’s kind of freaked me out.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Basically that you’d tire of me and when you did, you’d leave.’

  ‘Mary, I promise, I don’t find you the least bit boring.’

  ‘How can I be sure of that, Jack?’

  ‘I don’t sit here thinking about questions I’d like to ask you or subjects to discuss and then say, “Shit, this is Mary, so there’s no point in asking.” Come on, Mary, it doesn’t work that way. I’m with you because I love you. I’m not looking for an intellectual equal, I’m looking for someone to love.’

  ‘There, you said it, I’m not your equal—that’s what you think.’ She stood up and walked from the room. Moments later I watched her stride along the beach with the comical waddle of someone trying to walk through sand quickly. She looked like a cartoon character: all movement but no gain.

  She returned an hour later and sat in the chair opposite, one leg lazily dropped across the arm. ‘I think that was our first argument.’

  ‘I think so.’ I went to her. ‘You know I don’t think like that about you, Mary. Come on, would I be here if that was how I felt about you?’ I smiled thinly at the top of her head as I kissed it. My words sounded cheap and hollow—and they were.

  The holiday passed without further comment on Mary’s intelligence. That night we kissed and made love to heal the wound of our argument and the subject was closed. However, a shadow was cast and although we ignored the darkening when we were together I had no doubt Mary was as aware of it as I was. The near perfection of the return to the bach was broken and could never be mended.

  Mary returned to the maelstrom of wedding arrangements and the plethora of small arguments turned large by stress. In contrast to the chaos of the Roberts’ house, I returned to the maudlin silence of my home. I had lived in the red brick bungalow all my life. It was square and functional with a back lawn that sloped down to thick hedges. The garden was useless for playing with balls, which always rolled down and lodged in the sharp lower branches of the bushes, but it was ideal for the re-enactment of siege warfare. As a child, under a fierce summer sun I would play the crusader knight attacking a desert fortress. With plastic sword I would slay Ottomans on the deck battlements and gain possession of the flowerpots by slicing off the head of the last defender.

  I was standing on that slope the day Dad came to tell me Mum had left. He stood there, suddenly brittle in my memory, beckoning me to his side. Awkwardly he put a hand on my shoulder and patted me as though that act alone might soften the impact of what he had t
o say. I cried until he told me he thought she would be home by the weekend and she was just tired and needed time to rest. I still don’t know if he believed that to be true, or whether he just wanted to protect me. Maybe he just wanted me to stop crying. I can understand that: seeing me so distraught couldn’t have helped him to cope with his own grief. Whatever he thought, though, I’m sure he never contemplated the possibility that neither of us would ever see her again. If he’d known that, I think he would simply have given up then rather than slowly sliding down the following years as it dawned on us both that she was never coming home and we would never know what had driven her away.

  At first I assumed it was my fault. Who else made her tired? What mother could leave her child unless the child deserved to be left? Perhaps she couldn’t cope with my precocious talents. Dad ignored them, but did Mum just up and leave? However, as I grew older and became aware of what adults are capable of inflicting on one another I started to blame Dad as well. For exactly what I was unsure, but I imagined awful scenes of abuse behind closed doors. But I never blamed Mum for going.

  Christmas dinner passed with little celebration. Dad and I shared a simple meal, a bottle of wine and long periods of silence broken by brief conversations like sporadic gunfire on a sleepy night at the Western Front. After the meal he poured himself a whisky, which he drank in two gulps, then poured another, which he drank nearly as quickly again. I’d rarely seen him have more than a glass of wine at a time before. By evening he’d drunk half a bottle of whisky and his cheeks were flushed red. I shared a couple of drinks with him and smiled the inept smile of the half drunk.

  ‘Your mum never liked me drinking.’

  ‘Right,’ I replied, my usual response to one of his brief remarks. Inside, though, I felt as though a bomb detonated. This was information on an unprecedented scale, even if it had been delivered as though reporting the weather.

  ‘It seemed wrong to change the habit once she’d gone. You had enough on your plate, what with her going like that.’ He spoke with precision, as though he’d brooded on this conversation for years and now that he had finally spoken wanted to be sure what he said was correct.

  ‘I never remember you drinking more than a glass.’

  ‘I used to keep the whisky in the shed.’

  ‘What about at the bach?’

  ‘In the boat shed.’

  ‘And Mum never knew?’

  He just shrugged his shoulders at the question. ‘I don’t know for sure. She never said anything, but that’s not the same thing, is it?’

  ‘No, it’s not.’

  He caught the hard edge to my reply. ‘It’s not why she left, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

  His offhand remark angered me. How dare he make such presumptions? ‘How do you know?’ I asked with some trepidation despite my anger.

  ‘I think your mum just wanted more, more than you and me. I never got drunk, Jack. I just shot a few drinks in the evening, it wasn’t enough for her to leave us like that.’ There was a sudden bitterness in his voice that I could hardly begrudge.

  ‘She had to leave for a reason, it had to be someone’s fault.’

  ‘I don’t know, Jack, I just don’t know.’

  ‘I wonder if she found what she was looking for?’

  ‘I doubt it, people rarely do, but most acknowledge the failure.’

  We sat in silence for a moment before he poured us each another drink. ‘There’s nothing wrong with liquor, Jack, as long as you master it, never let the stuff control you. Once that happens, you’re finished. Then you’ll lose everything, and I mean everything. It never happens immediately and that’s the danger, Jack. You think you can keep what you have got, but eventually you lose everything. It will just slip through your hands like sand and before you know it, you open your hand and the sand has all gone.’

  It was the longest thing he’d said to me in years, but I didn’t listen to him. I didn’t think there was anything he could teach me. Next day I forced down an early morning drink as a dare to him and me. I could be different, as I was in so many other ways. I could prove my old man wrong and tame the drink. I could keep the sand in my hands—what a victory that would be. The whisky tasted awful but I would not be defeated.

  SEVEN

  Polly’s wedding was from start to finish an epic—a Ben Hur of the marriage world, an expensive style setter for the three girls who would follow and no detail left to chance. I couldn’t help but feel that furtive glances were cast at Mary and me as though sizing us up for the next instalment, much like an undertaker measuring potential clients at a cocktail party. Polly and David married in St Patrick’s, a beautiful and calm oasis amid the glass horrors of the city. The guests were well groomed and dressed for the occasion, everyone resplendent in the sun reflecting off the white walls of the church. It was a meeting of the beautiful people. They sauntered inside as if they owned the place. Lilies decorated the end of every pew, blooms of white against the wood. The ceremony was crisp and culminated in ‘Ave Maria’ sung by a ten-year-old cousin. Half an hour later, after a car procession that reminded me of a royal tour, we were drinking our first champagne of the reception. The sun was still fierce and I sweated in my suit.

  ‘So you must be Jack.’ I shook the outstretched hand. ‘I’m Caroline, Mary’s sister. We haven’t met before.’

  ‘Yes, I recognise you. Nice to meet you.’

  ‘I’ve heard a lot about you.’

  ‘All good, I hope.’ She held on to my fingers, only reluctantly letting go when I tugged them free. She was stunning in her bridesmaid dress, slim but with shape, her blonde hair curled and held by a braid embroidered with small blue flowers.

  ‘All good, Jack—there’s no need to worry.’

  ‘That’s great.’ I was embarrassed at her focused attention.

  ‘God, every time I see Mary she’s on about you and Cambridge—“Jack this, Jack that”, it’s hard to get away from you at times. Still, it sounds like you’re having an amazing time there. Are you? I mean I’d love to hear all about it.’

  ‘I’ll look forward to that.’

  ‘I shall seek you out for a dance after dinner, Jack Mitchell, so you watch out. I’ve never danced with a genius before and when I woke this morning I said to myself, this is the day. Now you wouldn’t disappoint a poor girl, would you?’ She smiled, revealing a perfect row of straight, bright white teeth.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats for the wedding supper.’

  Caroline tugged my elbow and pulled me toward a table near the dance floor. ‘This is you, Jack—I checked where you were sitting earlier. I’m afraid you get relegated to the minor family table. A few more years and you may make it to the top table. See you later.’

  ‘Look forward to that.’

  Caroline was certainly on the mark about the other guests at my table. They were minor nobility all right—cousins and friends only wheeled out on such occasions and a strange man called Jonathan Martin whom everyone knew but no one seemed to like. Despite several attempts to understand where he fitted in, the explanation eluded me. Cousin Keith rolled his eyes every time Jonathan spoke, revealing his dislike of the man. Later I learnt Jonathan had served in Vietnam with Mary’s father, an experience both men never discussed but which forged a friendship neither wished to relinquish. Others might dislike Jonathan, but for as long as old man Roberts was picking up the bill his old mate was always welcome. The story left me with a pang of jealousy that people could experience such closeness.

  When the golden summer evening light finally faded, gaudy flashing lights took its place and the soft chatter and rolling waves succumbed to the bass line of a Donna Summer song. I could almost hear the sigh of disdain from the older guests and whoop of delight from the younger ones. Like me, they had gritted their teeth and endured the small table talk of dinner and sat through the speeches, ignoring numb bottoms and sweaty discomfort in unfamiliar clothes, waiting for this moment of release. Mary grimaced as
she walked to me in tight shoes and after her first steps kicked them off and danced in bare feet.

  They played all the old favourites—classic Beatles, some Bee Gees, Abba greats and some rock’n’roll for the faithful oldies who ventured to mix it with the younger brigade. I could cope with most of these, but not with ‘Mull of Kintyre’.

  ‘Come on, Jack.’

  ‘No Mary, not this, please, I draw the line at this one.’

  But she was pulling me away from the window and onto the insanely overpopulated dance floor. Her feet were black at the sides from dirt.

  ‘Don’t you like this?’ she quizzed as she pulled me to her and nuzzled my neck.

  ‘In one word—no.’

  She pulled away and looked at me with genuine amazement. ‘Really? I love this song. You know I think Paul McCartney is great. He’s my favourite Beatle.’

  ‘That may well be right, but “Mull of bloody Kintyre”, please.’

  ‘Oh, come on, grumpy, give me a cuddle.’ She pulled me closer and kissed my cheek.

  The pace picked up after the grisly song. We danced wildly and gyrated to ‘Dancing Queen’, which brought the sweat from me in great rivers. I relinquished my place on the cramped floor and elbowed my way outside for some fresh air and the chance to cool down. The breeze was refreshing on my face and wet shirt. There was a terrace at the side, one end lit, but the other half was deep in shadow. Caroline sat there smoking a cigarette.

  ‘So here you are, Einstein.’

  ‘Here I am.’ Given my new status as a drinker I’d drunk a fair number of beers as well as wine. Of course, it was more than I was used to and my head was spinning as I stood looking at her. She had changed and now wore a simple blue summer dress with a subtle white pattern. The soft material caught in the breeze and billowed around her legs. Her hair was down now and looked lighter. This was the first time I’d really looked at her rather than merely acknowledging her presence. She was prettier than Mary (a wickedly guilty thought), her features softer, her eyes clearer and wider. There was no mistaking she was Mary’s sister, but she was like an improved version—a coupe to Mary’s four-door saloon.