The Last Weekend

by Blake Morrison

  ‘Be nice to him. Whether he’s dying or not, he isn’t well.’

  The act might be over but when your foreskin’s moist with cunt the act will be fresh on your mind. It was certainly on mine as I walked downstairs.

  I’ll be honest with you. Sex with Em hasn’t been easy of late. Not for the past couple of years, in fact, since she started trying for children. We’re rarely apart and sex is important to us both. It seems unfair, in the circumstances, that we haven’t produced a child. Unfair on Em, anyway. To me what’s unfair isn’t failing to conceive but the damage to our sex life: the thermometers and ‘impregnation-efficient positions’ and the worry whether we’re doing it too often or not enough. It’s no one’s fault, they tell us at the fertility clinic, but we’ve both suffered from a feeling of inadequacy. For Em it has been harder. She’s a woman. And though the initial diagnosis was ‘non-specific infertility', she naturally blamed herself.

  Sometimes the pressure gets to us. A few days before Badingley she laid into me when I returned late after dropping off at the pub (less for a beer than for the slots and fruits).

  ‘Childlessness suits you just fine, doesn’t it?’ she began. ‘If you were a dad, coming home late every night would be more tricky. You’re afraid of losing your freedom.’

  ‘Don’t be like this.’

  ‘I’m being myself. This is me.’

  ‘We’ve discussed it before.’

  ‘Yes, but we never get anywhere, do we?’

  For an answer I took her upstairs.

  ‘Would I be doing this if I didn’t want children?’

  It worked, after a fashion. But Em still believes I’m holding out on her, as though willing us to remain infertile.

  I’d be a liar if I said my performance hasn’t been affected. Men these days are encouraged to be soft — except in bed, where we have to be hard. Be gentle, be tough, kiss me, boss me, respect me, enter me — the mixed messages are sometimes too much. I lose confidence, lose patience, lose desire.

  Em blames herself, of course. She worries about putting on weight (not in the way she’d like to put on weight) and fears I’m no longer attracted to her. It makes life difficult for us both. None of it would have arisen but for the issue, or non-issue, of kids.

  Ollie was next to the fireplace in the living room, a tumbler of whisky in his hand, inspecting the two crossed swords.

  ‘I thought they were decorative,’ he said. ‘But feel that blade. They could do some serious damage. Want one?’

  He meant a whisky, not a sword, and I nodded.

  ‘Come through,’ he said. ‘There’s a choice of malts.’

  I had not been in the dining room since the first day and had almost forgotten it — easily done, since the door matched the design of the oak panelling in the corridor: once it was shut, you would never know the room was there. As a child, I’d loved adventure stories which featured secret chambers and used to comb our terraced house in search of one; now, decades later, I’d found it. An old drinks cabinet, with a mirrored interior and walnut surround, stood in the corner. Ollie pulled out a dining chair and gestured for me to sit down. The walls were a lurid violet and the brick floor smelled of mushrooms. But the room felt colder than the rest of the house, which was a relief.

  ‘Thank you for being frank earlier,’ Ollie said, closing the door. ‘I can’t be doing with evasions any more. It’s all too late for that.’

  Less of the too late, I thought. It was the moment to call his bluff, to say I knew, that Daisy had told Em, that his claim to be dying was a lie. But could Daisy be trusted? Suppose he was dying and she didn’t want us to know. Or that she’d convinced herself he wasn’t dying in order to feel less guilty about fucking Milo. If she was fucking Milo. The possibilities were endless.

  The malt tasted good — a Glenmorangie, twenty years old, tanged with bitterness.

  ‘You’ve set me thinking,’ he said.

  ‘Forget what I said.’

  ‘Milo and Daisy are too fond of each other, you implied. What’s the evidence?’

  ‘I probably imagined it. Em says I have a dirty mind.’

  ‘Imagined what? Stop protecting me, Ian. There’s more to this.’

  I swirled the whisky in my glass and thought of the malt-brown North Sea, how even the clearest sky can’t turn it blue.

  I looked at him and drew breath.

  ‘I’ll tell you, if it’s bothering you, but I’m sure it’s nothing. Last night, after you’d gone to bed, I took the dog for a walk, and when I came back Daisy was lying on the sofa, looking dishevelled. She seemed rather put out to see me.’

  ‘Where was Milo?’

  ‘I don’t know. He probably heard me coming in and went off to bed.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘They’d been talking. He’d told her about his marriage breaking up and how he planned to move to New York, and she was upset.’

  ‘Daisy cries easily.’

  ‘Yes, and she obviously had been crying. I fetched her some water while she straightened her clothes.’

  ‘Why would her clothes need straightening?’

  ‘No reason. I’m not suggesting she’d been up to anything.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Nothing. Daisy loves you, not Milo.’

  ‘You mean they’re having an affair?’

  ‘No way. She might have a crush on him but she wouldn’t act on it. Not lightly. I should have kept my mouth shut. My dream life’s disgusting.’

  ‘What have dreams to do with it?’

  ‘Well, that’s the other thing. I shouldn’t tell you, it’s embarrassing — but after Daisy had gone off to bed I went through to see Rufus, and I was so tired I ended up falling asleep on the rug beside him, and next thing there were voices, as if Milo had come back down, and then — sorry, this is ridiculous — I heard two people having sex.’

  ‘Fucking hell.’

  ‘No, but the point is it was only a dream. When I woke up and went through no one was there. I imagined the whole thing.’

  ‘Maybe you overheard them in your sleep.’

  ‘There’d have been evidence. Stains on the sofa or tissues in the waste bin. Trust me. Nothing happened except in my head. I apologise for bringing it up. Can I have another malt, please?’

  You will think me a bad person, and sometimes I think so too. But it was true about the dream. So much had happened I’d forgotten it till then. After falling asleep next to Rufus, that’s what I dreamt, the sweet memory of making love to Daisy coursing through me but with Milo in my place. I couldn’t tell Ollie the whole truth. And if the dream hadn’t come back at that moment, I would have refrained from telling him. But nor did I invent it. I’m not a monster.

  Having said that, as we sat there in the cold little room I can’t deny a certain satisfaction in seeing Ollie suffer. I’ve not spent my life in jealousy, but it did briefly poison my existence. And since Ollie was to blame for that, it was only right that he know how it felt.

  I was avenging myself on Daisy, too. She might have been cold and aloof on the beach but she’d slept with me willingly enough the night before, and her eagerness, her sluttish enthusiasm, made me wonder how many other men she’d had before me. If Ollie now suspected her, that was only just. Suspicion is what she deserved.

  ‘If it’s true, I don’t blame her,’ he said, his back to me as he stood at the drinks cabinet.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve not been easy to live with. It evens things up.’

  I looked at him quizzically as he handed me the malt but he avoided my eyes, as if to say Let’s leave it at that. Was he saying he’d had mistresses? Or that he’d made life difficult for her in other ways? I’d no time to digest it before he spoke again.

  ‘Did I say when I showed you round?’ he said, gesturing to the four walls. ‘This is the room they brought my father to. Before they took him to the morgue.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Surely I t
old you about his death.’

  ‘You told me he died when you were twelve. You never said how.’

  ‘He drowned. While we were on holiday here. When they recovered the body, they brought him to this room and laid him out.’

  He gripped the table edge, as if the solid wood between his fingers and thumb would somehow authenticate the story.

  ‘God,’ I said, playing along, ‘how awful.’

  ‘I remember my mother and me standing here. The oilskin they’d wrapped him in smelled of fish. There was a tiny strand of seaweed in his hair that made me think they must have dredged him from the seabed. But they found the body three miles out to sea. As if he’d set off to swim to Denmark and got into trouble. As if he’d been trying to escape us.’

  I tried to remember when Ollie had first told me about his father dying. Before he met Daisy or after? Probably after. The word ‘tragedy’ would have made her feel sorry for him, just as his tales of Sandhurst made her think him brave. Hero and victim: no wonder she’d fallen under his spell. But to me he’d spoken only of a sudden death, as if from a heart attack or stroke, not a drowning. Of course, I wanted to believe he was telling the truth. But there was something opportunistic about it. Plagiaristic, too: only that morning Mr Quarles had described losing his family in the North Sea. I’d not been there but Em said it was the saddest story. Now Ollie in his usual way was trying to cap it.

  ‘That can’t be right,’ I said, disputing the escape theory, not (as I should have) the entire story. ‘You’ve always said he loved you and your mother.’

  ‘He loved us but he felt trapped. They found a twenty-pound note in the inside pocket of his trunks. Why was that there?’

  ‘By accident.’

  ‘Or to start a new life.’

  ‘You can’t start a new life with twenty pounds.’

  ‘My father could. I’d let him down, you see.’

  ‘He was proud of you, you told me.’

  ‘It was our last day — the bank holiday Monday — and we’d planned an early-morning swim. But when he came into my bedroom, I didn’t feel like it and pretended to be asleep. He stood there saying my name then gave up and went alone.’

  ‘If you’d gone you might have drowned too.’

  ‘Rather that than him dying alone.’

  ‘But if you’d died there would have been no Daisy in your life, or Archie, or a career or …’

  Something bright — a sword-flash — lit the room from outside, then came an explosion to waken death.

  ‘What the fuck?’

  I heard the girls screaming outside, then adult laughter and the clip-clop of two doors being closed.

  Rain at last.

  Thunder was just the start of it. For the next two hours the house was a ship at sea, timbers creaking, deck sloshing, the horizon lost behind spray. Silver pitchforks flashed through the air then tossed us into darkness. You’d have thought a pantiled roof would be secure, but it drummed and rattled like a shanty hut, helpless against the chiding rain. A dozen leaks sprang from the eaves, the worst of them in our bedroom: I stuck a bucket underneath and let the drips slowly change their tune — ping, prang, sprong, shlung, sklish, shoosh — as the water rose towards the brim. Em was out of bed by then, coming down to watch the spectacle with the rest of us. What a picture we made, seven faces lining the windows while the terrace turned to rapids and the field ditch overflowed. I fixed my eyes on a plastic fertiliser bag — its neck open and its body slashed — as gusts bullied it about the orchard. Even the bales out in the meadow looked ready to take off. Under the French windows, sandbagged with towels, a pool seeped across the floor tiles. And still the storm bawled and tantrumed outside, our house the centre of its rage, the nails shrieking in the weatherboarding as the wind wrenched them like a crowbar.

  I stood next to Daisy. One kind look would have cured me. But she refused to acknowledge me and disappeared upstairs.

  It occurred to me that Milo was responsible for her moodiness — that when they were walking on the beach he’d upset her again and that, rather than be angry with him, she was punishing me. I decided to have a word with him, man to man. He was in the snug down the corridor, where Natalie and Bethany, tired of watching the rain, had unearthed a heap of board games. With no Em to deputise — her head was still bad and she’d gone back to bed — he was playing snakes and ladders with them. Pressed, I agreed to play a round or two. It was difficult to be candid when Natalie and Bethany were present, so for a while I gave myself up to the game and taught them the difference between ‘die’ and ‘dice’ ('you can have any number of dice but you can’t have more than one die'), while my niftiness with the cup-shaker secured me three victories in a row. Bored of losing, the girls went off to find Rufus. It was then I seized my chance.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear about you and Bianca,’ I said, placing the counters for another game.

  ‘It’s for the best,’ Milo said, after a pause. ‘If we were going to break up, better now than later.’

  ‘There’s no one else involved, then?’ An obvious question, I thought, but he seemed taken aback. ‘If that’s not too intrusive a question.’

  He picked up the two dice and shook them in the cup.

  ‘There wasn’t. But Bianca’s started seeing someone in New York.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I’m in no state. It’s far too soon.’

  ‘A good-looking bloke like you — you could have your pick.’

  ‘The girls come first. All my energy goes into looking after them.’

  ‘You’re making a great job of it,’ I said, though it was Em who’d looked after them all weekend.

  ‘I do my best. Us breaking up is hard on them.’

  ‘On Daisy, too,’ I said.

  ‘Daisy?’

  ‘She told me about you moving to New York. It’s unsettled her. She’ll miss you.’

  ‘And I’ll miss her,’ he said. Then, in case I got the wrong idea, which was probably the right idea, he added, ‘I owe her a lot.’

  I ran a finger down a snake. Blue eyes, long lashes, boyish cheeks, chest hair sprouting from his open collar: I wanted to slap him down, to crow that I’d had her and he hadn’t. But what if he had?

  ‘All I’m saying is be nice to her,’ I said.

  ‘I hope I am being.’

  ‘Of course. But you know how sensitive she is. She feels rejected.’

  ‘She shouldn’t.’

  ‘You can’t be too attentive. She needs all the love she can get.’

  The girls returned at that point, and demanded another game. But I’d said enough to get the point across. At the end of the game, which after my three earlier wins I didn’t mind losing, Milo caught my eye and nodded, as if to say Thanks, mate. That’s good advice.

  To encourage him to pay court to Daisy went against the grain. But with any luck it might cheer her up.

  In the living room, Daisy and Ollie sat in silence by the window, watching the rain. As I hesitated, wondering whether to join them, Em appeared, her headache seemingly cured.

  ‘Poor Archie,’ she said, taking my arm, ‘out in this.’

  ‘I’m sure they have tents,’ Daisy said.

  I squeezed Em’s arm, as if to say What parenting! If it were our child out in a storm we’d not be so laissez-faire. But Daisy had a lot to take on board. Last night with me had blown her world apart.

  ‘Drink anyone?’ said Ollie, who had clearly had several.

  ‘Just a small one,’ I said, reluctant to put a damper on the evening.

  No one felt like cooking. We were too tired, too lazy, too enthralled by the weather. And the drink we got through as we watched — even Milo’s girls were treated to sips of wine — only increased our torpor. At 7.27 (a good time in my book) the rain finally stopped. Still no one talked about supper, till Milo’s girls began to whine and he promised them scrambled egg if they changed into their nighties.

  ‘While Milo’s cooking for the girls,’ Daisy said, ‘I
’ll make something for the rest of us.’

  ‘That’ll be nice,’ Milo said.

  I could see Ollie clocking them both and wasn’t surprised when he suggested a takeaway instead.

  ‘You’ve done enough entertaining for one weekend, darling,’ he said.

  An ancient card was pinned to the noticeboard with a phone number for a restaurant called the Indian Pearl, and, unlikely though it seemed, someone answered immediately and took our order. The place was a twenty-minute drive, Ollie said. Since he was way over the limit I volunteered to do the driving. With Em and Milo absorbed in the girls, it was a chance for Ollie and Daisy to talk. Maybe he would confront her with his suspicions and Milo would be asked to leave.

  Outside, the rain had eased off, not snare-drumming now but pinging like pebbles in a pan. I slammed the car door and was already turning into the drive when Daisy appeared, flagging me down.

  ‘Ollie said you’d need a hand,’ she said, climbing in beside me.

  There’s something I haven’t told you which I ought to confess, even if it makes you think worse of me. It’s about the debt Em and I were in. I say ‘we’ but we’ve always had separate accounts, so officially I was the one. I didn’t tell her because it would have worried her and I thought I’d have the problem sorted soon enough. I’ve had such crises before. Something always turns up.

  There’s nothing wrong with gambling. People in the City are paid to do it and the money’s not even their own. I’ve often envied them that power and freedom. With my head for numbers, I could have made a brilliant hedge fund manager. And I’d not have fucked up like the bankers and brokers in the City have done. Betting’s the basis of our whole economy.

  But you have to work to a system. And you can’t take stupid risks when it’s other people’s savings you’re playing with.

  At least I’ve no one else’s losses on my conscience. Still, I do feel bad about what happened. Back in January Em and I agreed to start saving for IVF, in case the traditional method for impregnation continued to fail. We gave ourselves a year: by putting aside a regular sum each month, we’d have saved enough for a first (and we hoped last) round of IVF by Christmas. The best way to proceed, I argued, was for Em to pay the household bills while I accumulated capital in my savings account. She had her doubts but in the end I talked her round. There was a principle at stake: I wanted to prove she could trust me. No more websites.