“I was hoping we would eat first and have a chat, then if you like I’ll go down there with you and you can show me some of your latest stuff.”
That was a treat for Roger, because usually I would walk down to the allotments with him and leave him on his own while I came back and tidied up. He loved showing me around, even though I had seen the vast majority of it all a hundred times at least. He agreed, and while I got on with cooking the food, I asked him about his day.
“Miss Tresize brought in her parrot today,” he told me. “You should have seen it. Great big blue-and-green thing. I taught it to speak.”
“Really?” I said. “What did you teach it to say?” Once again, Roger dissolved into the same mini-fit of giggles which had overcome him this morning, covering his mouth and looking away. It was all I could do to remain calm. “Seriously, Roger, what did you teach the parrot to say?”
It took him a few more seconds to get sufficiently over the hilarity of the situation so that he was able to get the words out, and when he did so it was like a five-year-old trying out a mild swear word in front of his parents.
“I love you,” he said at last.
“Well, that’s a nice thing to teach it, Roger,” I said. “Now whenever anyone speaks to the parrot, it’ll say ‘I love you’, and that will give everyone a good laugh.”
“I love you,” he said again, as though, having said it and not got into trouble, he now wanted to see how the words felt on his tongue. “I love you. I love you.”
“Yes, thanks, Roger,” I said. “You are beginning to sound like the parrot. I think the novelty might wear out quite quickly.” But he was still going on.
“I love you. I love you. I love you.” And then it was as though, having pushed his luck thus far, he was pausing to wonder whether to push it just a little bit further. Then he did.
“I love you, Harriet. I love you, Harriet. I love you, Harriet.”
The grill tray hit the floor with the sound of a thunderclap, and Roger’s hand went instantly to his mouth, this time covering it. When I turned round to face him, I could see that his eyes were wide and pleading with me to tell him that everything was all right. It took me a second or two of struggling to regain self-control, but I managed to do so.
“It’s OK, Roger,” I said. “It was just an accident. The handle was hot and it slipped out of my hand.” I bent to start picking up the fragments of half-cooked fish fingers which had come apart and were spread across the kitchen floor. “That’s a shame. Looks like we’ll have to start again.” I felt a squelch under the heel of my foot, but failed to recoil fast enough to avoid squashing a grilled tomato into the rug.
* * *
Fifteen minutes later I had cooked more fish fingers and Roger and I were sitting opposite each other at the tiny table which took up about a third of the entire space of the kitchen. It was covered with a plastic, easy-to-clean cloth which featured old-fashioned kitchen utensils against a white background. There was a mangle, and a washboard, and a smoothing iron. It had been one of the items I picked up from the charity shop when I was trying to equip the flat quickly.
“So, Roger,” I said, making my very best effort to seem as calm and casual as I knew how. “You were asking me this morning about Harriet.” I put another forkful of food in my mouth and chewed it for a little while, trying to give the impression of being in no hurry for the conversation to continue. “You were asking what I thought Harriet saw in… who was it… Brendan, I think you said?” I went on chewing, and then folded a piece of bread and dabbed it in the tomato ketchup which was now in place of what would have been the grilled tomatoes. “I think you said you had seen them kissing? Was that what you said?”
I glanced up from my plate towards Roger and saw that he was not sure how to respond. Plainly he wasn’t entirely comfortable, but he didn’t seem too ill at ease either. He nodded his head. I went back to my food, torn in two by the feeling of urgency to get to the point, but fighting against the certainty that any sign of it would have the opposite effect.
“So when was that, Roger? When did you see them kissing?” Roger was looking back at me, but was neither moving nor speaking. It was as though he was trying to weigh up what to tell me. Or maybe he was trying to weigh up exactly what it was he thought he saw. “Was it at the garden party we went to? When we dropped the other lads off?” He shook his head. No, that was very definitely not what he was thinking of. “When was it then?” I kept chewing. “Roger?” Still chewing. “When did you see Harriet and Brendan kissing?”
I thought I was going to burst with impatience when I could see that Roger was struggling to get his words out. Almost as though he had a stammer, which he did not. I tried hard to force myself to say nothing, to put no more pressure on him. Finally he spoke.
“At the market square.”
“Oh, really?” I said. “What market square was that?
“Was it called Convent Garden?”
“Oh,” I said, “Covent Garden. You mean when the quartet was playing downstairs in the piazza, and you and I were collecting money from bystanders?” He nodded his head. We had got there. This was what he meant. “And was it when we had finished? When we had all packed up and everyone was going our separate ways?” Maybe I was grasping at straws now. Maybe I was simply reluctant to go where this was going. Roger shook his head. “When was it then?” I think that my voice was still calm, but any hope I had that there was an innocent explanation was disappearing fast.
“It was when you and I went to the shops to get coffee for everyone. Martin and Jed went off to look in the museum shop, and Harriet and Brendan were on their own. You sent me back to find out if anyone wanted any biscuits, and I saw them.”
At last a coherent sentence, but even now his account was short of the final coup. His words were coming our breathlessly, as if they had been a burden to him and were being offloaded in a rush. Now it was as though I didn’t want to hear it. I said nothing to encourage him to continue, but having got himself into a state where he was telling it, he was going to spill it all out. He had passed the point of no return. He had lost sight of any concern about whether I was going to be happy, or sad or angry or to totally lose my fucking mind. He had crossed the Rubicon, and here it was, heading towards me, now unstoppable.
“They were standing in the corner of the square, away from everyone else. They were holding each other. He was kissing her, and it took a long time. I watched them for a minute, but I knew that I had to ask them about the sweets. I was about to ask them when I heard Brendan tell Harriet that he loved her. Just like I taught the parrot. ‘I love you, Harriet,’ he said. They still hadn’t seen me so I came back. I said that no one wanted anything, but I hadn’t really asked them.”
I’ve heard people describe moments like this as being like going into a long tunnel, and have always thought that it was just a turn of phrase. Actually that image is about as good an expression of what was happening to me at that moment as I can think of. I had entered a long tunnel, there were no exits on either side, and all I could do was to head forward and downwards in a long, numb, desolate hollow of disbelief. As my mind wrestled with what Roger was saying, I remembered the moment. I remembered Roger shaking his head when I asked if anyone had said yes to sweets or biscuits. I wondered if I had thought anything odd about it then. Odd that no one wanted anything. Odd that Roger had just shaken his head. Had I seen anything unusual in his expression at the time? Had he even registered properly that he had seen something amiss… something he was not supposed to see?
I knew that there was nothing else to say, and it was with the greatest difficulty imaginable that I appeared to remain calm while Roger finished his food. I felt as though someone had reached out their hand towards me, stuck it down my throat, grabbed my guts and wrenched them out and onto the floor in front of me. I felt empty and in pain. I said nothing. I could say nothing. We ate the rest of our food in silence; Roger absorbed with his fish fingers and the prospect of going to the insect farm; m
e utterly lost in a labyrinth of despair.
Afterwards he and I walked the few blocks towards the allotments and I, as I had promised, went through the motions of paying attention as he spoke about his ants and his sticklebacks and his stag beetles and his worms. I listened as he talked about how they gathered their food and how they organized their lives, no doubt entirely oblivious to the fact that they were part of another larger world, where other beings also lived their lives, themselves every bit as unaware of their irrelevance to the wider universe.
Chapter Sixteen
How is it possible for anyone ever to believe the idea that an emotion can be adequately conveyed by a mere combination of words? How could we ever think that anyone who hadn’t experienced them could glean from words on a page even the slightest inkling of what an intensely felt passion is really like?
I describe a wall as painted red, and if you have seen the colour red before then you may have an idea of what I am talking about. Perhaps you are picturing something from the Union Jack while I am picturing something from a pillar box, but we’re likely to be in the same territory. Red is red, or something close to it. I say “red” and you have in your mind’s eye something similar to what I have in my mind’s eye. It works.
Or I can describe a day as sunny or a surface as rough, and, as you have experienced sunny days and rough surfaces, you can get an idea of what I am talking about. The warmth of the sun on your skin, the feeling of harshness under the palm of your hand. But how can anyone describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it the exquisite pain that arises from the feeling that the person with whom you are so deeply in love is in love with someone else? How can that happen?
Most of us have put our fingers momentarily into the flame of a candle. Does it give you any idea of what it is like to experience first-degree burns in a fire? Not really. You know it is unpleasant, and the merest hint of what it might be like to keep your finger in the flame makes you withdraw it with an instant and involuntary reaction. The experience of being burned is so horrendous that the body automatically recoils from getting any closer than is unavoidable to the full-blown experience.
So when someone you love has shown a moment of inappropriate affection for another person, you may have experienced a pang of jealousy. Or the kiss under the mistletoe, or under the influence, that takes just a second longer than you are comfortable about. You feel a twinge, but nothing you are likely to have experienced as a result of such a commonplace comes anywhere close to the tangible, physical, corrosive agony that accompanies full-blown jealousy. Nothing comes close.
The nearest I can get to conveying it is to think about a heavy weight in your stomach, or rather a heavy weight just above your stomach, sitting somewhere between your guts and your heart. A physical lump, with actual mass, just sitting there. It feels for all the world like a cancer, or like a tumour that you know is going to turn into a cancer in years to come. A physical trauma that will trigger something debilitating which, in its turn, will eventually kill you.
Have you heard the expression “You don’t know where to put yourself”? That applies here. You don’t. You walk from room to room, unable to settle in one place. You sit, and then you get up and walk around some more. Lying down, you find that the weight of it shifts onto your lungs and that you cannot get your breath. You sit up, panting, stiff, congested and unable to get the oxygen circulating properly through the bloodstream.
The images that swim around your head are all physical. His view of her as she takes off her clothes and moves towards him. His eyes perusing that beautiful lustrous body that you think of as all your own. Your property. Your domain. Other eyes admiring it. Other hands upon it.
Her view of him, up close, as she brings the lips that you have so often kissed up to kiss his neck and his chest and his mouth. Just as she has so often kissed you. His face is not your face. His neck is not your neck; she knows it and yet she kisses him as avidly as ever she has kissed you.
Then an outside view of the two of them, entwined in a tight and sweaty embrace, tongues and bodies locked together in passion. No, even though the words come nowhere near the reality, I cannot write more. Even now, so many years after the event, the pain is every bit as sharp as it was all that time ago.
I simply cannot understand or explain how I managed to survive the time before I saw Harriet again. It was three weeks before the Christmas holidays and there was no question of her being able to come down for a weekend before then, and so I had no choice but to live with my demons. Nothing to do but to wait and drink the nights away. Not only did I have to wait, but I had to remain calm. I could not afford to let Roger know what his observation had done to me. I could not allow Harriet to get a hint that I was in hell. Any hope of managing the situation lay in the possibility of remaining in control; and so I had to quell my instinctive desire to fall to my knees and release a scream of anguish, and instead to go about my usual routine just as though everything in my life was still normal.
But nothing was. It sounds now as though it must be an exaggeration, but I really don’t think that I got more than an hour per night of uninterrupted sleep in the entire three weeks from the moment Roger told me his story. Each night I lay in bed, contorted with anguish at the thoughts which flooded into my head and laid siege to my sanity. Each night I turned over in my mind the various words of reassurance that Harriet had used whenever we discussed our lives apart. I recalled in precise detail the conversation we had had when I succumbed to my unwise outburst about Brendan remaining a part of our lives. Perhaps I should have realized then? Her response had been so angry, so over the top. Perhaps there was a clue that I had missed?
I thought about the reassurance her words had given me, about the regret and the anguish I had felt for being so stupid as to harbour even the smallest suspicion. I lay in bed and thought of these things, and no force on earth could prevent my mind from travelling the three hundred miles which I could not travel with my body to the little room at the top of the stairs in the house which Harriet was said to be sharing with three other girls.
There she was, right at this moment, the woman that I loved more than the moon and the stars and all the riches of the earth, embracing and kissing and fucking the man I already hated more than anyone else on the planet. Here was I, at precisely the same moment, at the other end of the country, lying in my bed, sad, alone, pathetic and weeping for the betrayal of my faith.
My mind went through the whole gamut of possibilities. Sometimes I would grasp at the idea that Roger might still have been mistaken. I was a drowning man reaching out to a lifeboat. Yes, perhaps that was possible. After all, Roger is an idiot. Yes, he is; what am I doing taking the word of an idiot above the promise from the woman I love? Have I lost my mind? All this anger and torture and despair for nothing. A misunderstanding, a case of mistaken identity – anything could be possible.
Seldom did the respite last more than just a few minutes, as I recalled the occasion that Roger had described and remembered the circumstances, and also the look on his face when he had returned from his errand. Of course, there was no mistake. I, Jonathan Maguire, had voluntarily absented myself from the side of the woman I loved, and my presence and my affections had been replaced by Brendan fucking Harcourt. What could be sadder? Or more predictable? Or more pathetic?
My preoccupation – no, my obsession with the stark realities of the situation meant that it was only in the last week before the end of the autumn term that I began to think about how I would handle the situation directly with Harriet. She had been due to come back on the following Thursday evening, but on the Monday evening she called and said that she had made better than expected progress with an essay she had been working on, and was now planning to come the following day instead.
“I’ve bought tickets for Thursday,” she said, “and I think I will have to pay extra if I change the day I travel.” She asked me what I thought. I said that she should get on the earlier train.
“M
aybe the conductor won’t notice the date. Or if he does, you can no doubt charm him. And if the worst comes to the worst, you can always pay the difference. It’s got to be worth it for the two extra days.”
So now she was coming home tomorrow and my mind went into overdrive. In those twenty-four hours I imagined every eventuality. At times I thought that perhaps I would confront her and that she would immediately offer an explanation which was comprehensive and unassailable. I would breathe a sigh of relief which could propel an ocean-going yacht, and tell her what an idiot I had been. She would laugh at my silliness, and all the suffering, so awful and unbearable for such a long time, would quickly melt away to become just a ghastly nightmare.
Those times were few and brief. At other times I imagined her stunned into silence by my revelation, and then confessing all and imploring me for forgiveness. I did not consider what I would do in such circumstances. The wound was so deep that contemplating forgiveness was impossible, and yet the notion of being without her? Equally not possible.
Lastly, and most frequently, I anticipated Harriet telling me that she was sorry that I had found out in this way, that she had intended to tell me herself, and that she was planning to leave me to go to live with Brendan. Again, in such circumstances, I had no idea how I would be able to handle the situation. The set of facts were so repugnant that my brain simply refused to engage, and I found myself staring into an abyss.
Sometimes at the end of term, and especially if she had a lot of luggage to bring down, I would go to meet Harriet at King’s Cross. While secretly hating it, I always managed to appear to do so willingly. I hated it almost as bitterly as I hated going to see her off. A formerly magnificent building which had seen a glorious history now down at heel and surrounded by a seedy selection of tramps and drunks and pathetic men, heads down, darting in and out of massage parlours. The idea of staging an emotional scene in such a godforsaken hole, be it either of the pain of parting or the joy of reunion, was anathema to me, and something I would wish to avoid if at all possible. If Harriet had heavy bags to carry, then it was not possible to avoid it. On this occasion, thank heavens, it was.
The Insect Farm Page 14