Getting a Life

by Helen Simpson

“That’s good,” said Penny as they made their way to the auditorium. “Time to enjoy the meal in the interval that way. Not like in Pelléas and Mélisande.”

  “No, that was terrible!” agreed her husband. “Massive long affair that was, and only two fifteen-minute breaks.”

  “Awful,” said Penny, shaking her head. “Bolting down Coronation Chicken in the first interval, if you could call it an interval, then not-very-nice blueberry cheesecake in the second one and no time to finish your coffee. This is much nicer,” she said, turning to Janine with a gracious smile.

  In the dark listening to the music, Janine lifted away from the world of people and things. She forgot about the shadowy pin-stripes each side of her and concentrated on the stage, where mourners like moving white statues tossed flowers on Eurydice’s tomb. The bereaved husband Orpheus lay poleaxed by grief while the chorus of mourners sang their beautiful lament. “Eurydice!” cried Orpheus, and she felt the frisson in her flesh. “Eurydice!” he cried again, interrupting the mourners, and she sighed. Then for a third time he cried out “Eurydice!” and this time she jumped, for Nigel Perkins was whispering in her left ear.

  “That’s cheerful,” he was hissing. “Kicking off with a funeral.”

  On stage the spirit of Hymen extinguished his torch to show marriage sundered by death, and the chorus sang:

  L’amoureuse tourterelle

  Toujours tendre, toujours fidèle

  Ainsi soupire et meurt de douleur.

  Again Janine felt the unwelcome warmth of Nigel Perkins’s breath in her ear.

  “I said, look, they’ve got surtitles,” he whispered noisily. “You needn’t have worried about me after all.”

  Janine forced herself to nod and smile.

  “Nice of you, though,” he added huskily.

  At this point someone in the row behind shushed him and he settled back into his seat and shut up.

  Was it marriage itself which had died, then, she wondered, returning to the other world; was it this ideal of turtledoves and fidelity, of the long-haul flight without betrayal which had proved unworkable? Orpheus sang with mounting grief, urgent and controlled. It was coming back to her now, the particular quality of distress in this opera, where from the start something terrible has happened; something irreversible. And that’s just like death, she thought. The line has been crossed and everything has changed.

  The music had stolen up on her like hot water flooding over her skin. She remembered that morning, in the half hour before waking, how a procession had trooped through her mind of all the people she had loved who were now dead. Last time Christopher had come home drunk from a client reception, she had wondered aloud whether he would notice if she died, and he had said how he bet she would like him dead, then she would have no more pain or trouble. She stifled a groan.

  Now Amour was informing Orpheus in cheery silvered tones that the gods had taken pity on him and would allow him down into the infernal regions to fetch Eurydice back to life—on one condition. He must not look at her while in the precincts of the dead, nor tell her why not.

  Soumis au silence

  Contrains ton désir

  Fais-toi violence

  sang Amour, and above the stage the surtitles slid past: In obedient silence / Hold your longing in check / Go against your every instinct. The words flew at her and landed in her like arrows. Wait in silence, yes, that was what was required of her, with the traditional carrot that love would be rewarded. But, she thought wrathfully, unlike in operas, we grow old while waiting in silence.

  Orpheus was facing the Furies now, their rancorous music with booms and blaring from the horns, their flashing strings and fierce runs in octaves. He waited, then pleaded with the help of harp and flute to be allowed down to the kingdom of the dead. Again and again the Furies refused him, but at last his entreaties softened their hearts and they let him go. If only, thought Janine. When she said, I’m miserable, to Christopher, he said, No you’re not. When she raged at him like one of the Furies, he said, I love you. Unfair. Unanswerable.

  Back in the hospitality room at the interval, Christopher was all tenderness and attention, hovering dotingly over Dominic Pilling of Schnell-Darwittersbank and hanging on Dominic Pilling’s wife’s every word.

  “London’s getting terribly crowded, isn’t it,” said the wife. “Too many people. I’m afraid I’m a country girl at heart.”

  “You love gardening,” Christopher suggested fondly.

  “Oh yes. Except I get dreadful hay fever,” she said.

  “So we have to get someone in to do it,” laughed Dominic.

  “Because Dominic’s not around enough at weekends to guarantee keeping it down,” she said.

  “I have better things to do with my leisure time than cut the grass.”

  “Like work,” she said nastily.

  Janine caught Christopher’s eye and looked away again. We’ll be like them in five years’ time, she thought, if we carry on like this; it’s what you do every day that changes you.

  “Ah leisure,” said Christopher hastily. “That precious commodity. We’re just in the process of booking ourselves a holiday, aren’t we, darling. Where did you go last time?”

  “Club Med,” said Dominic Pilling with enthusiasm. “Brilliant. The actual country you’re in is irrelevant. They’re all organized to the same very high standards so it hardly matters.”

  “You don’t have to lift a finger,” cooed his wife. “The children are taken care of. You never see them! They adore it.”

  “The main thing is to recharge the batteries,” declared Dominic.

  “Are you enjoying the opera?” asked Janine.

  “Oh, it’s super,” said his wife. “And not too long either.”

  Sitting in the dark again, Janine realized that they had not been out on their own together that year. The music of Elysium came creeping in through her ears, slow, sublime, holding and catching her breath until she sighed deeply and shifted in her seat. He had no time for her. This must be what music was for, she thought, so while on the outside you moderated and rationalized and subdued, in your secret self you were allowed to live with an intensity not otherwise sanctioned. He was never there. Now the orchestral music became more complex, an oboe melody with rippling triplet accompaniment from the strings, braided like the surface of a fast-flowing river, or like the patterned weavings of thought and feeling, trouble and desire.

  Eurydice was pleading with her husband to take her in his arms. She sang her hurt in soft slow soaring phrases and descents. Why was he ignoring her? Was she no longer beautiful to him?

  Janine felt a hot prickling sensation behind her face, like walking into a rosebush. Almost the worst thing was being frozen into these corny, passive and wifely attitudes of grief and betrayal. The ravishingly sweet quarrel of their voices blended and untangled, pulling air down into her lungs, making her sigh helplessly.

  Eurydice sang, Dear husband, I can hardly breathe for sorrow. Orpheus was protesting his devotion and at the same time crushing her with his indifference. Then at last he cracked. He turned to look back at her. She died instantly. It was the least bombastic of operatic deaths, and the most comfortless. He had misjudged and this time she was lost forever.

  As he began his famous aria, J’ai perdu mon Euridice, Janine realized that tears were streaming down her face. For pity’s sake, she thought, not here, and tried to wipe them away unobtrusively with the back of her hand. But they kept on coming. The next thing was that Nigel Perkins was smuggling his handkerchief into her lap and whispering something in her ear. What was he saying? It sounded like, One too many. That made her want to giggle, or spit at him. Luckily Christopher was at the other end of the row. She took some deep slow breaths and pushed the music away from her.

  At least this was not an opera where the best was kept till last. The final two scenes were as unconvincing as ever, trundling on towards their unearned happy ending. As far as Janine was concerned, it was over already. She listened un
moved as Amour stopped Orpheus from killing himself and told him everything would be all right. She couldn’t have cared less when he produced Eurydice like a rabbit from a hat before ascending to heaven on a cloud attended by zephyrs and cupids. By the time the last note had sounded, she was ready to go. First, though, there was the crashing tide of applause to wade through.

  “Thank you for lending me your handkerchief,” she said to Nigel Perkins as they clapped on steadily, side by side. “I sometimes get a bit swept away when I go to the opera.”

  “My wife can’t handle champagne either,” he said. “I won’t let her touch it.”

  “Ah,” said Janine.

  “It was a bit of a cop-out, the ending, I thought,” said Nigel, jerking his head towards the stage.

  “Difficult to do the original, though,” she replied. “Drunken maenads tear Orpheus into pieces and rip his head off.”

  “There you are, you see,” grinned Nigel. “Women and alcohol. Fatal combination. Keep the hankie, by the way.”

  “No thanks,” said Janine, handing it back. “You cloth-eared jerk.”

  He stared at her as though he couldn’t believe his ears; and, after all, she had spoken softly enough in the middle of all this noise for doubt to exist.

  “But it was sweet of you to think of me,” she gushed, smiling at him gratefully and leaning across the arm of the seat to give him a peck on the cheek.

  At last it was over, the queuing for coats, the milling around outside in the night air and the hulloo’d thanks and farewells as cab doors slammed shut. When the last client had been tucked into a taxi and sent purring off into the darkness, Janine yawned a great yawn and finished this yawn with a growl. Christopher had switched off his hospitality smile and was giving her a wary look.

  “Are you all right,” he said.

  “Yup.”

  “Goodgood.” He paused. “The cabs seem to have dried up all of a sudden. You wait here, I’ll go and find one.”

  “I’m coming with you,” she said, but he was off.

  She went wild. She started to run after him, but he was faster than her.

  “Christopher,” she shouted.

  He pretended not to hear.

  “Christopher!” she yelled again.

  He was a dark figure about to melt into the blackness.

  “Christopher!” she bellowed with all her might and lung power.

  He slowed down gradually, unwillingly, then stopped and stood where he was for a few long seconds before turning to look back at her.

  CHEERS

  The frost which beautified the car that morning had turned it into something else, a hardened glacé fruit, the green of its paintwork obscured by a nap of crystal bristles. Inside, Lois tried the ignition a few more times and tutted at the engine’s croupy yelping.

  When she looked up at passing cars, she saw dazzled faces screwed into eyeless masks. The forecast had promised a wind-chill factor of minus twelve in the week to come. She couldn’t get it to start so she would have to walk to the station.

  All across Cator Park trees stood cold and fabulous, elaborately naked in their diamonds. Crack troops flashing silver from the windows of nearby houses charged into their leafless branches and ended up in smithereens. Lois stalked along the paths like a film star, collar up and hands thrust deep in pockets.

  On the station platform she stood beneath a sweet and heartless blue sky with no warmth or depth to it. It would be much easier to live if it were always like this, thought Lois: thin-blooded, energetic, unsmudged. The other sort of December day—defeated outlook, wet pavements, fine mean sleet—was harder to take.

  Once on the London Bridge train she opened that morning’s Christmas cards, a batch of wassail cups and donkeys and gaitered snowballers, and studied the handwritten messages inside. So Isobel had got her divorce after all. And here was Jill announcing that she and Gavin and their brood were moving to the country. On the whole Lois thought this a mistake which would lead to an increase in their morosity and paranoia. They were trying to twitch their coat hems away from the rest of humanity, and would spend their whole time in the car listening to story tapes. The main thing, thought Lois, looking out the window at south London’s back gardens, the important thing as middle age came and sat down on you with its enormous bum, the vital thing surely was, not to grow too careful of yourself.

  She reviewed her arrangements for the rest of that day. The boys were at her childminder’s and would stay overnight as she, Lois, was meeting an old college friend for a meal after the shops closed, and would be back late. And William could no longer be asked to do anything domestic like collect the children. His home was now less his castle than his garage.

  In the last year he had been coming home later and later until it hardly seemed worth it, with eyes like fried eggs, completely unreachable, falling half clothed dead asleep beside her. He wouldn’t say what it was, if it was anything worse than not being young anymore. He wouldn’t talk to her. Last night she had seen by the landing light how he lay with his mouth half open, a little pocket of rotten-fruit breath playing at its entrance, and she had been tempted to light a match a couple of inches above his teeth and watch the ghostly blue flames dance over his features.

  At London Bridge she went underground, resurfacing at Oxford Circus on a wave of close-packed shoppers. Jammed together like this, sharing each other’s warm and stale breath, shoulder against back or arm or rib cage, each struggled to preserve some inner distance by refusing to meet other eyes. I like being among people and not knowing them, even this, thought Lois; I like being part of the crowd. She surged across Oxford Street on another wave, then expertly up the escalators at John Lewis until she stood at a shelf of bolts of plastic-coated fabric. Coziness was the worst of the Christmas cons, she decided as she rejected the Dingly Dell design.

  Two meters should do it, she thought, examining the other patterns, envisaging her dining table with the extra leaf in it at two o’clock on Christmas Day. There was William at the head, well into the next bottle, blearily inaccessible. Beside him sat his mother, chatting her way round the orbital loop of early Alzheimer’s. Then there were her boys, rolling sprouts at each other and at their cousins; her younger sister, widowed that year, still electric with grief and terror; her elder sister, not even trying to look as though she were not hungering after her unfortunately married man at the head of his own groaning festive board; and their angry mother, sixty-eight, mouth stained with red wine, like a pike in claret.

  “Two and a half meters please,” she said as the man unwound a panorama of wipe-clean poinsettias. There they had all been, ready at the gates when she had woken early that morning, waiting to walk right into her mind and sit down and let her look after them. Beneath her duvet she had felt herself unraveled by rancorous pity, dismembered by tenderness and resentment.

  The rest of the afternoon went in packed shops and glitter and cash. She had seen it all before, she knew just where to go and what to buy, but it still delighted her, choosing presents. She was looking forward to seeing Holly too. She loved being out, talking about something outside herself. They were meeting in a Polish café Holly had chosen.

  This café, Lois found as she later consulted her map of the underground, was four stops down the Bakerloo line, then five along District and Circle. Once on the train she sat discrete and silent beneath her carrier bags. Christmas had become one big advertising campaign for the family, but nobody pointed out how the family would close you down to the outside world given half a chance. She glanced appreciatively at the strangers around her, all ages and shapes and sizes.

  There were faces foolish from office parties, and late guarded shoppers like herself. Beside her a tall black man sat reading an evangelical newsletter, while members of the Japanese group opposite were examining a program for The Phantom of the Opera.

  At the head of the carriage swayed a frisky grizzled growler and crooner. He was conducting his own party, growing livelier by the minute. No
w he was creeping up to women sitting alone, a Rumpelstiltskin on pointed toes of stealth, thrusting out his chin and snorting a whiskey-drenched blast into their faces, laughing with delight when they jumped. He did it to Lois and in spite of herself she jumped like the rest. Next he skipped over to the Japanese group and stood there in front of it making slitty eyes and hooting with pleasure.

  Lois smelled the whiskey which fueled him, and considered the old theory of spontaneous combustion. His every organ must be saturated with Scotch, his veins running amber, his bodily tissues highly inflammable. The world was awash on a sea of alcohol, she realized, Russia, Scotland, Romania, the entire Eastern bloc. Oh, and Scandinavia too, of course, its length and breadth, and don’t forget the Low Countries.

  Tired of teasing, he lurched across the carriage to a support rail against which he steadied himself, then took out a cigarette. Lois held her breath as he lit it with a clumsily struck match.

  “There is no smoking on the underground trains,” came a voice sumptuous in its gravity.

  It was the man beside her who had spoken.

  Lois nearly jumped out of her skin. The rest of the carriage leaned forward agog. The drunk narrowed his eyes incredulously at his challenger, then opened them clownishly wide, then narrowed them again.

  “You must put out your cigarette,” said her neighbor.

  When the drunk took a defiant drag and puffed smoke at him like a naughty boy, he rose from his seat, plucked out the cigarette between finger and thumb, and ground it underfoot. Then he sat down and resumed reading his Christian news.

  Lois caught a cunning look on the drinker’s face. She watched his hand creep towards the inside pocket of his mac in elaborate slow motion; as if, she thought, for a knife.

  She got up and moved away and murmured about the knife to the young Australian she found herself standing beside. No worries, he said, there’s no knife, and anyway he’s a big guy, he can take care of himself. But sheer bone and heft is no protection against steel, she thought, uneasy as the train at last drew in to Piccadilly Circus. The drinker darted up to his reprover and shook his hand as though they were old friends, unleashing as he did so some incomprehensible truism about life, or death; then nipped off the train at the last minute with a merry farewell wave of his hand.