by Tim Parks
Thomas cast about for the actual sums of money but couldn’t remember. ‘Anyway, it was pretty cheap. I mean, it was a serious saving. Mary was always smart that way.’
‘Except it was Christmas.’
‘Right. And my mother was staying. She wasn’t well, either. I think she’d had her first operation that year.’
The shrink nodded. ‘Presumably you objected to bringing the decorators in.’
‘I wasn’t enthusiastic. I felt we should do it in summer when it wouldn’t matter having the windows open for everything to dry and the hell with the money since we didn’t really have a money problem at the time. I think Mary was naturally a little anxious over money at this point. Not sure why. She didn’t use to be when we were younger. Then it was the other way round. Me worried, her not. Anyway, she called them in. I think it was the day after Boxing Day. If not Boxing Day itself.’
‘So,’ the shrink observed. ‘You were insisting on a traditional Christmas show for your mother, and your wife got the decorators in.’
‘Actually, Mary liked cooking turkey. I mean, once she’d decided to do it. Having my mother there gave her a chance to show how good she was. And she really was. Really is. Certainly much more elaborate than Mum ever could be. Mary is a great cook. In fact, from the moment we agreed it would be right to have Mum over, because it might well be the last year she would be well enough to make the trip, I can’t recall any of the usual argument about whether we should have a traditional Christmas lunch or not.’
The shrink waited.
Thomas sighed. How weird, suddenly to be going over all this old stuff again. He felt torn.
‘Basically, it was a disaster. My wife was still in the phase when she thought the dog needed a two-hour walk every day. I mean, she had got herself an outdoor kind of dog and she felt guilty if she didn’t walk him enough.’
‘Guilty?’
‘She said he needed to be walked. She had a responsibility. Obviously my mum couldn’t go with her because she was pretty much reduced to a few steps around the garden. That meant I had to stay at home. So Mary would take Mark for company. Of course he would rather have slept in. Mary would bribe him by taking them to the coffee bar for a cake or something, but then they had to walk for two hours and they came back irritated and annoyed. Even the dog was exhausted.’
‘And your daughter? Presumably she was home at Christmas.’
Thomas laughed more heartily. ‘Sally? She wouldn’t have dreamed of going. She just says no. Refuses point-blank.’
The shrink smiled. ‘There’s always someone who does that.’
Thomas stopped and breathed deeply. What was that supposed to mean?
‘I was on her side,’ he said, as if this altered anything. ‘She was studying pretty hard for her finals then. To make matters worse, if I remember rightly, Mark’s girlfriend had left him on Christmas Eve, the same day Mum arrived, which rather put a damper on the Christmas lunch. He was really upset. That was his first serious girlfriend. Of course we were being as sympathetic as possible, but no doubt he could see that we were all pleased as well, because it was pretty obvious to everyone that they weren’t really suited to each other. We were glad it was over.’
‘Ah,’ the shrink nodded, sagely.
‘In fact, as I recall it, I was thinking this was a major piece of good news, them splitting up – you know one’s always terrified of one’s children choosing the wrong partner, right? Mary and I were a hundred per cent agreed about that. All the same, the break-up put a very big damper on the party; Mark is usually a lot of fun and seeing him take it so hard and then texting all the time wasn’t encouraging. Plus of course there was the worry they would get back together. And then things would have been worse than before.’
The shrink raised a very wry eyebrow here, which again seemed to be trying to tell Thomas something. His mood had definitely shifted. It felt good to be telling the story of this awful Christmas, though dangerous as well, exhilaratingly dangerous. Like walking along the edge of a cliff. Suddenly there was a rush of memory.
‘The fact is, over the next few days I felt so angry I wanted to die. I really wanted to lie down and die.’
In response to this the shrink sat up with a face of intense concern. It was almost comical. Sometimes Thomas thought of her as Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back. There was the same mix of exaggerated facial expression and supposed wisdom. ‘Imagine Yoda smoking ultra-thin menthol cigarettes and you have it,’ he had once told Elsa, but then it turned out she hadn’t seen Star Wars. She hadn’t been born then.
‘People who feel angry often want to hit back,’ the shrink pointed out, ‘but not to die.’
Thomas hesitated. Was he really going to go there?
‘Normally,’ he stalled, ‘I would have joined in the walks, even with my mum being there – I like walking – but somebody needed to stay home and be around while these guys did the decorating. There was lots of heavy furniture to move and cover up. That’s it, I remember now. It was part of the cheap deal she’d negotiated that they would find each room ready to paint or paper when they arrived in the mornings, without having to do all the preliminaries. And I knew if I didn’t cover things up properly, masking tape round the skirting board and so on, and they got paint drippings on them, or if the rooms weren’t ready, there would be trouble. I was tired that year and not feeling too well at the time. Bad back and the rest. I don’t want to go into that. It was an old problem I’d been having. But what drove me mad was these two guys – and we’re talking your classic working-class decorators, one middle aged, one young, a real double act – they could see perfectly well what the situation was between myself and Mary and they were faking respect for me but actually smirking and my mother could see this as well and the children too and the guys would ask me questions, what to do about this corner or that mirror, and when I answered they said maybe you should phone the missus in case she sees it differently and they were right of course, so I did, and she asked me to pass the phone to them so she could speak to them directly and I realised they had only asked me first to save themselves the cost of the phone call because they could perfectly well have phoned her directly and left me to get on with whatever I was doing, and then right in the middle of it all, the day they were going to do the big bedroom, our bedroom, I made a mistake and put everything but the bed out on the terrace – the bedroom was on the top floor and had a kind of roof terrace – the bedside tables, an armchair, the carpets, the lamps, a chest of drawers, a low table, etc., etc. and then a little later when I was downstairs making a coffee for Mum – one problem was we couldn’t put the heating on because of the need to keep the windows open, so it was freezing, except in the kitchen where I’d fixed a space heater – the day suddenly clouds over and this huge, but really huge gust of wind comes along and blows everything about, including a nice lampstand with a madly expensive glass shade that shattered into about ten million pieces over the chairs and rugs, and the decorators pretended to be sympathetic but were really sniggering. So then for the rest of the morning I was dreading my wife coming back, which she eventually did, with the dog looking more knackered than ever and Mark in a state of angry misery, and Mary sighed as if to say what could one expect, and she said maybe this was a good moment to get rid of the big painting above the stairs that was a favourite of mine but that she had never liked. My mother, needless to say, was looking like all she wanted to do was to be allowed to get on the next train home and die in peace, she wasn’t used to people arguing, and …’
Thomas stopped. The shrink had been chuckling, but now used a drag on her cigarette to change the expression to a frown. Thomas knew then that she knew he wasn’t telling her the half of it. He felt cautious.
‘I remember having a dream,’ he began. ‘One of those nights.’ Again he stopped.
The shrink watched. For the first time she seemed sceptical.
‘I’m not sure if it was really one of those nights. But it comes back to me now.�
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The shrink sighed. ‘Tell me.’
‘I had a girlfriend at the time,’ Thomas said, a little sheepishly. ‘A mistress, maybe you’d have to say.’
The shrink was hardly surprised. They had been through this.
‘Let’s say girlfriend,’ she said.
‘I’d been with her maybe a year at this point. We got on pretty well. Anyway, I dreamed we were in a mountain valley. It was green and very beautiful and we seemed happy and relaxed and she was dressed very beautifully and rather chastely in a long flowery skirt down to bare feet. I think my feet were bare too. I almost always have bare feet in dreams. Go figure.’
The shrink nodded.
She’s being paid for this, Thomas thought. I’m paying her to nod like this.
‘It was beautiful, I mean the whole scene just said: beauty, serenity, happiness. A caricature. Except there was the problem that we needed to go somewhere to eat and sleep. There was nothing in the valley but beauty. You can’t eat beauty. So we were following a path downwards that seemed to be taking us somewhere, except that it led into a tunnel. It seemed to be an old railway tunnel, disused now, and we started walking into it, thinking we would soon be out. It was pitch dark, which was worrying with us being barefoot, but there was something faintly white in the distance and we thought it must be daylight, even if it didn’t look like daylight; in fact when we got there it was ice, or maybe frozen snow, blocking the tunnel from top to bottom, there was no way through, it was packed tight, and I remember waking and thinking how strange it was that there could be snow inside a tunnel when there was none outside and wondering how it had got there.’
Thomas stopped.
The shrink stubbed out her second cigarette and smoothed out her dress, which had rumpled when she leaned forward.
‘You were telling me about that Christmas.’
‘I drove my mother into town to the station, probably New Year’s Eve, both pretending it had been a great stay and that everything was fine, even though we each knew perfectly well that the other knew perfectly well that on the contrary nothing was fine, everything was wrong. And driving back home I thought for the thousandth time that my wife was behaving the way she was because of my mistress, not that she knew about her, but I suppose these things are sort of in the air, so I called her, my girlfriend – I stopped in a service station, I remember – and told her we would have to stop, it was over. She was terribly upset, couldn’t believe it even, because we had been getting on so well, and naturally I felt a complete shit, not to mention spectacularly unhappy, but also like I had no right to complain, since it was hardly fair of me to have this mistress, fair on either of them I mean, Mary or her, and when I got back the dog had wagged his muddy tail all over the new wallpaper to one side of the front door and Mary was just laughing and I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t angry. I suggested we go out to a celebratory dinner for Hogmanay but she said the dog couldn’t be left alone because the fireworks would drive him mad and the children couldn’t dog-sit because they both had parties of their own, at one of which needless to say Mark got back with his inappropriate girlfriend. So all those tears had been for nothing and on the day …’
‘Mr Paige.’
Thomas stopped.
‘I’m afraid our time is up and I have another appointment.’
The shrink smiled kindly, but somehow sadly too.
‘Let me just ask you, though, was this Christmas you’ve just spent on your own better or worse than that?’
Thomas had already moved forward on his chair to get up. He felt foolish.
‘Well,’ he grinned, ‘friends kept commiserating because I was alone, like, how awful, Christmas on your own, you know, but actually, well, actually, it was fine. I felt fine.’
‘And your girlfriend is coming back soon?’
‘This evening. I’m going straight to the airport right now to meet her.’
Saying this, it was embarrassing how unable he was to hide his pleasure.
The shrink stood up, smoothed her crumpled dress, picked up the ashtray with her left hand and offered her right to Thomas to be shaken.
‘Next Thursday, then. Same time. Do feel free to call me if you need to.’
In the hallway, Thomas passed a man who was struggling to pull off a motorcycle helmet. During the bus ride to the station, watching sprays of slush from the filthy gutters, he reflected on the shrink’s method. Was it a method? He felt ashamed of himself and rather happy.
MUSIC
In the concert hall Thomas tries to concentrate on the music. He is sitting beside his girlfriend. The programme is Verdi, symphonies and arias. As a result, the concert hall, usually half empty, is full. Verdi is popular, it seems, though his symphonies are rarely played. Thomas and his girlfriend are near the front but way over to the left, so that they have to look right to see the faces of the first violinists.
What does it mean to concentrate on music? Thomas remembers sitting in the same position, though in a different concert hall, many years ago to listen to Bach’s organ music. An entirely different cup of tea. He had been beside his wife then. He had always sat to the left of his wife, as he now always sits to the left of his girlfriend. Is it he or they who make this decision? Has there ever been a woman he sat to the right of? On that occasion too there had been the problem of concentrating. He had been tormented by the dilemma: should he leave his wife? His unhappiness made it impossible for him to follow the music. In one fugue he had forced himself to imagine that the notes of the dominant voice, at once so random and so perfect, were moving around the concert hall, probing at hidden places in the walls and roof. Trying to find a way out, perhaps. This game had allowed Thomas to hold on to the notes for a while, his eyes shifting in the high corners of the hall, above the organ pipes, imagining the music moving there, feeling, pushing, looking for space and light. Doing that, he had remembered that at school there had been a poem by Robert Browning where an organist thinks of the notes of a toccata as a kind of search, or quest for something hidden. He hadn’t been able to recall the name of the poem at the time, and still can’t recall it now, thinking back from Verdi to Bach, from his girlfriend to his wife, who then sat tensely by his side as he tried so hard to concentrate on the music rather than their problems by following its imagined movements around the concert hall, all too aware that this could hardly be what was really meant by concentrating on music; truly to concentrate on music would surely mean having your head full of the sound, its qualities and harmonies, without these words and this constant effort, this forced and fanciful analogy of notes probing for a way out of the concert building, which of course, he realises now, had been just him hoping for a way out of his dilemma – his marriage, rather – not to mention the gnawing, pathetic, mean concern that since he was incapable of concentrating on the music he was actually wasting an evening that had cost a lot of money.
The orchestra winds up one piece, pauses for applause, then begins another so similar to the first that Thomas would be hard put to prove that the musicians are not just repeating the same thing. You cannot follow Verdi’s symphonies round the room, he reflects. The notes don’t go anywhere. Rather they turn in on themselves, like a maypole dance, girls and boys in circles, ducking under each other’s arms, hands meeting in the air holding ribbons and handkerchiefs. Or like patterns in old lace tablecloths, predictably frilly, charming enough in their way, but not something anyone really has much use for these days. Perhaps it’s not his fault he can’t concentrate. It’s Verdi’s. No wonder no one ever plays these symphonies. At least Bach was challenging.
Beside Thomas his girlfriend, who once studied music at the conservatory, seems happily focused. No doubt she is hearing all the nuances that escape him. Marvelling at her absorption, Thomas feels envious. His wife too had given the impression of being absorbed on the few occasions they went to concerts, though with his wife he had felt – and this was true of himself too – it was more a desire to be absorbed, a craving
to concentrate, consequent, in reality, on an uneasy feeling of exclusion – this cathedral of sound excludes me, this beauty excludes me, I want to get into it, I want to be part of it, but I can’t – and this had given his wife that disquieting tension she had, something visible, palpable even, in her slightly forward leaning posture and set facial muscles. There had definitely been an aura of anxiety around his wife and indeed himself, in these situations, at concerts and the like; they both tried too hard to experience the thing, whatever it is, that people should experience at concerts, hence both felt unable to relax.
Alas, we were very much alike in that, Thomas thinks. So that now Thomas wonders why he and his wife hadn’t been able to make common cause of that feeling of exclusion, their being locked out of things, locked into their own worlds, their own uneasiness. Why had they turned against each other? Why had the marriage become a battle, rather than a friendship? Whatever music he had listened to at home, his wife tended to make fun of it. ‘Such a bore!’ she wailed. ‘Turn it off!’ ‘Another whiny woman’s voice,’ she complained, ‘you’re giving me a headache!’ For his part, he had observed that the music his wife liked was not really music at all. Tom Paxton. Frank Sinatra. Ironic words, romantic words. All text and no tune. Yes, if you were looking for the reasons why it really was necessary to leave your wife, Thomas now tells himself, and the truth is he is always looking for such reasons, you need go no further than the way you both react to music, always criticising each other’s taste, making it impossible for either to listen to anything when the other is in the house. ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’, he suddenly recalls, and simultaneously the people around him burst into wild applause; a tall dark woman in her fifties has appeared on the stage.