by Patrick Gale
Alison wondered what had drawn this unusual acrimony from him. She worried that it might be Jamie’s neglect, hoped it was merely the result of one of her mother’s fortnightly telephone calls. A different waiter brought their main courses – chicken for him, fish for her – which, to her relief, seemed to mark a change of subject. They slipped into habitual roles of roué and ingénue, comforting, because long since outgrown.
‘And what about you?’ he teased. ‘Do you have affairs?’
‘No,’ she said and grinned down at her Sole Véronique. ‘I don’t think I’d know one of it hit me in the face.’ At this juncture the role required a blush but she merely looked knowing. She had never been able to blush on cue the way Jamie could. She had read somewhere that this ability, along with the inability to pronounce one’s Rs – a failure Jamie only lapsed back into when drunk – was an indication of rich sexual responsiveness. The information was absurd, but she felt nonetheless hurt by it. It was yet another little shard of genetic injustice, like her sloping shoulders, tendency to burn in the sun and inability to hold a melody – each of them inherited from her mother.
‘You should at your age,’ he said with that tactlessness to which the old are privileged.’ ‘Your first bloom has barely left you.’
‘Nobody has affairs any more, except adulterers,’ she pointed out.
‘Alright, sex then,’ he countered.
‘Why does everyone think it so important?’ she asked.
‘It helps one grow. It reminds us we’re alive.’
‘But it’s so time-consuming and upsetting. It gets in the way of everything.’ She knew she was playing devil’s advocate but she wanted to see what he would say.
‘But that’s half the point, surely?’ he insisted. ‘If affairs, sex, whatever, could be timetabled, they wouldn’t be half so beneficial. Joan Crawford used to give her husbands timetables to make love to her – “5.30 feed children, 6.30 cocktails, 7.30 make love” – and look what became of her!’
‘She became one of the highest earning women in America and lived to a ripe and rich old age,’ Alison retorted, having caught a sneaking admiration for Joan Crawford from her friends at the helpline.
‘A monstrous old age!’ he laughed.
They talked on through puddings, dessert wine and a round of unwise, strong coffee. Then Alison remembered she had to work the next day and her grandfather paid the bill and called for a taxi. A lull followed as they waited and the atmosphere between them, cleared by good humour of family acrimony, became charged instead with nostalgia and regret.
‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘since it’s been an evening for honesty, do you think Jamie will ever marry?’
‘No,’ she said, adding, after a slight pause, ‘never with a woman. Probably not with anyone.’ Despite the absurdity, she held off from saying ‘man’ but she saw him wince.
‘I suspected not,’ he said. ‘And what about you?’
She thought a moment, fingering her coffee spoon.
‘I thought you were always telling us not to plot destinies.’
‘I am. I do. But let’s say, for once, you had the choice. Would you?’
‘Not marriage,’ she said cautiously. ‘I don’t really see the point. It seems to me the benefits are too unevenly distributed. But I’d like to find someone. Live with them. I don’t know why I say that because I love my own company, I prefer it really. And I’m not lonely. Not what I think of as lonely. And I hardly ever meet couples who don’t make me grateful to be single. But. Oh. I don’t know. Why does anyone want to live with anyone? I know women who do it over and over. Cynthia’s one of them. Serially domestic. And they never learn that they’re happier single. I’d like to think it’s conditioning and we could overcome the urge with logic and politics, but I’m afraid it might be biological. We’re programmed to share, for better or worse.’ She saw him smiling, the kindness of his gaze tinged with irony.
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I think half the trouble for me and Jamie is that we grew up with the ideal of your marriage.’
‘But Sally was dead long before you were born.’
‘So? We soon found out about her. Miriam told us. About how she fell in love with you even though you were her patient and Jewish and German and younger than she was. And then The Roundel and writing for films and how she pulled you through when everything was so awful –’ She heard herself reach instinctively for her mother’s euphemisms. ‘Maybe it’s just because it ended so tragically. Who knows? Maybe if she was still alive and we’d known her and seen you both together arguing and cooking and buying groceries, it would all be less romantic. But it was so perfect.’
‘You think so?’ He frowned minutely, then seemed to wipe the frown away with a nervous movement of his hand.
‘Of course,’ she insisted. ‘I was always asking Miriam to tell me details over again. It was better than a fairy story. You loved each other. You supported each other. It set us a bewilderingly high standard. I can’t really believe I’ll find any relationship that comes up to scratch.’
‘I’m sure you will,’ he assured her. ‘I just hope that when you do you’ll have it for longer than we did.’
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m tired and I’ve been drivelling.’
‘No you haven’t,’ he said as the waiter approached to tell them of the cab’s arrival. ‘You’re making perfect sense.’ But there was something hasty in the way he stood that implied relief at the interruption of her outpouring. Of course, she told herself, he loved Sally still after all these years. The subject still caused him pain.
They passed out onto the pavement and she felt his hand come to rest protectively on the small of her back. He kissed her goodnight and she briefly resented the pity in his tenderness. Once she had told the cab driver to take her to Bow, she slid the pane of glass between them closed so as to be alone with the thoughts the old man had stirred up in her. The bunch of flowers on the seat beside her threatened to make her sneeze, so she tugged down one of the windows to dilute its scent with the warm, trafficky breeze from the Brompton Road. She realised that, for all the talk of living alone and romantic yearnings, neither of them had mentioned Sam. Whether this was delicacy on her grandfather’s part or merely a septuagenarian’s forgetfulness, she was grateful.
Woozily warm-hearted with wine, she dimly discerned that, through all the talk and, oddly, through her grandfather’s anger, a stage had been reached in her spirit, a phase passed through. She knew that in all probability she was returning to an empty house but she was glad of it. She was no longer angry with Jamie and Sam, she knew, would go his own way whatever she said or did.
She sprawled back into a corner of the seat, yawned, fingered the bunch of flowers and yawned again. She would give her brother a few days then suggest lunch and a little placatory truth-telling.
39
Jamie’s intentions, at least, had been good. Although Alison’s tone when she called had given him every reason to dread the occasion, he had fully intended to come to the concert. He and his grandfather did not meet as often as Jamie would have liked, and he was as proud as she was to be a famous composer’s heir. He also loved Edward deeply, but found the love hard to communicate and weighed down by respect for the old man. Ever since he had abandoned music for mammon, his love had been undercut by guilt. Although he would never have amounted to anything more glamorous as a singer than a jobbing professional, he could never see his grandfather without being aware that, in choosing Lloyd’s, he had chosen the easy path.
Work, however, had not prevented him from going to the concert. He had returned home in good time and taken the unprecedented step of missing a session at the gym in order to shower and change. Dressing was a quick process. He knew men with complicated, expensive wardrobes divided into clothes for working, clothes for hunting love and a bewildering array of smart yet informal clothes for meeting the lover’s family at weekends, should the hunt prove sufficiently successful. Jamie’s own wardrobe was simplified
by having never developed clothes of the third category beyond a dinner jacket and trousers, bought during the brief phase in his late teens when he had made a few appearances with a semi-professional chamber choir. The suit’s only outings now were an annual excursion to Glyndebourne with his grandfather and occasional pretentious parties connected with his work, such as Nick Godfreys’s forthcoming ball. Less vain than he was practical, when Jamie found something that suited him – a certain colour of shirt or cut of jeans – he bought several at once. His shirts were all white, black or blue. His work shirts, relegated to a special shelf in his wardrobe, came in a wide variety of stripes but he never, ever wore them except for work. This practice dated from his first day at Lloyd’s when he vowed he would never allow its dubious influence to bleed into what he thought of as his real life.
Tonight he made a concession to culture and his grandfather by wearing his jeans with all the fly buttons done up and leaving his condoms at home. He shaved for the second time that day, dabbed on some cologne that Alison had given him and, with similar tact, made a last-minute exchange of his habitual cheap plastic watch for the silver one his grandfather had given him for his twenty-first birthday, which he rarely wore because he worried about losing it and the strap tweaked painfully at the fine hairs on his wrists. He checked his reflection in a space wiped clear on the steamed-up bathroom mirror, snatched his wallet and keys and headed out to the street.
He was shocked to see Sam leaning on the balustrade of Albert Bridge, plainly waiting for him. Sam spotted him before Jamie could change direction or dart out of sight into the park. Sam was wearing his coat, despite the residual warmth of the day, and as he walked briskly back from the bridge, it slapped about his legs. For one insane moment, Jamie was terrified. Sam’s face was set like that of a man about to deliver a blow or sweep someone violently off their feet. He gave no smile in response to Jamie’s nervous, ‘Hi. Fancy seeing you!’ but coldly asked, ‘Going out?’
‘No,’ Jamie said.
‘Good. Then you can buy me a drink. That poncey pub on the corner by your place’ll do.’
Jamie had lied on impulse and the lie was no sooner uttered than he found himself borne along on another’s implacable will.
He had brought Sam back with him from the march and they had made fairly unremarkable love. For all his experience, Jamie retained a guarded romantic ideal – carefully hidden from his sister and friends – that somewhere out there lurked the Right Man and that, if ever they met, he would know, he would sense his rightness from the first, knee-trembling kiss. He knew from the way the first clumsy embrace began with them painfully clunking noses, that Sam was to be just another one-night stand. He regretted this because of the awkwardness it would inevitably cause with Alison. If he was to hurt her, as he surely had done, she would prefer to see it done for some long-term benefit, but that could not be helped. As one-night stands went, it was neither the dullest nor the most exciting.
After a few nervous pleasantries, they had said nothing to one another during the taxi ride back to the flat and Jamie could almost pretend that they had just met in the street or in a launderette. Sam took to staring out of the window. Glancing across at him, Jamie saw that he did so not from boredom but tension. When they arrived, his every movement was stiff, his fists were rigid and his jaw was clamped tight. Serving him a lager from the fridge, Jamie wondered if it were Sam’s first time, but discounted the idea as preposterous in someone who must be nearly thirty. Sam stood by the big picture window which gave on to the balcony, gruffly admiring the view of the river.
‘It must be good here when the lights come on on the bridge,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Jamie agreed. ‘It is.’
He decided to move swiftly. In one deft movement, he took Sam’s unfinished beer from his hand and made to kiss him but Sam reacted with no less sudden violence, shoving him from him and sending the lager can flying. For an instant, Jamie was frightened of what he might do next, then Sam seized his arm and pulled him back towards him. He was shaking.
‘Sorry,’ he muttered, as if in pain. ‘Sorry. Try again. Quickly. Please.’
Confused, Jamie reached up around the bristly nape of his neck and kissed him again. Still shaking, Sam responded feverishly, almost with greed and Jamie decided it might be his first time after all. Their bodies bumped against the window, rattled a picture on the wall, and rocked the bookcase so that the idol fell heavily on to the carpet. This much was exciting.
It was exciting, too, to strip Sam’s clothes from him item by item. Clunked noses or no, it was exciting to embrace someone so much taller than himself. But from the moment they tumbled, button-fumbling, on to Jamie’s mattress, Sam appeared to lose his spirit as swiftly as he had found it. His dick was hard but so was his body, unyielding, stiff. Jamie made love to him easily enough, fucked him, in fact, but Sam didn’t come, expressed no interest in doing so. All this left Jamie with the conviction that Sam had indeed been a virgin. He also feared the decision that Sam was no more than one-night-stand material had somehow been communicated with merciless clarity. Jamie had soothed his own unease by scribbling down his telephone number before making his customary, half-apologetic declaration about an early start the following morning. Remembering just in time that it was Sunday the next day, he hastily took his grandfather’s name in vain, mumbling that he had agreed to drive out to visit him for lunch.
‘Well, you know where you can get hold of me, don’t you?’ Sam had muttered, snatching the scrap of paper before slipping out into the night.
Sam had not telephoned, and Jamie certainly had not tried to contact him. He had spent Sunday lolling on the sofa in a newspaper sea, flicking between matinées that were not quite bad enough to abandon, and spent the evening at a peculiarly horrible all-male dinner party in an over-designed flat off Holland Park.
‘What’ll you have?’ he asked in the pub, because Sam had pointedly sat down at a table without offering.
‘Bitter.’
As he bought the drinks, Jamie felt a sudden wave of common sense. What was he thinking of? He returned to the table and, after they had each taken a gulp, offered the truth.
‘Actually, I was on my way to meet Alison at the Albert Hall. A new piece by our grandfather’s being played and –’
Sam stood, slopping the drinks.
‘Well you should have said. You’d better go.’
‘Well … No. Listen.’
‘She’ll be angry.’
‘No she won’t. Alison always understands.’
‘If you say so.’ Sam shrugged and sat down again. He drew a finger through the puddle he had made on the tabletop. ‘Did you ring?’ he asked. ‘I didn’t go back to her place, so I thought you might have.’
Jamie wondered whether to lie.
‘No,’ he said. ‘To be brutally honest.’
When Sam spoke again, his voice was no longer sullen but coloured with vivid anger.
‘Well I did,’ he said. ‘At least I tried. Why go through all that business with the phone number, then give me the wrong fucking one?’
‘I didn’t,’ Jamie insisted, all innocence, then broke off when Sam confronted him with the crumpled paper. The number was right, in a way, but Jamie had scribbled a zero in such a way that it read as a six. ‘My writing,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’
Sam merely stared at him in a way that withered the untruth and sent curls of tension through Jamie’s stomach, then he drained off his pint, his adam’s apple working at his shirt collar. He finished it without so much as a gasp and, standing, pointed at Jamie’s barely touched lager.
‘Same again?’
‘Er. No. I’m okay, thanks.’
Jamie watched him stride to the bar. The man was acting like someone unhinged. Everyone knew – surely even wild cards like Sam – that a one-night stand remained just that unless the host gave some sign, like an invitation to stay the night, or stay to breakfast or return to supper. Everyone knew. There was an etiquette to these
things, painfully learned. It was designed to make harsh truths less harsh. Rejection or, at least, non-involvement, was an axiom of the casual encounter, precisely to avoid misunderstanding like this one. Jamie did not want an involvement. Not even with a friend of his sister. Especially not with a friend of his sister. Not even if he looked like an angel with a New Brutalist haircut. Not even if he were tall enough to carry one around the room. He did not want an involvement and yet something kept him pinned to his seat, fingering his chilly glass and watching Sam stare the barman into serving him next. The way to the door was clear, there was still time to slip out, flag down a taxi and escape to the concert. He stayed.
When Sam returned, Jamie could see at a glance that the beer was already going to his head. His eyes were bright and slightly unfocused, his voice unnecessarily loud. A man and woman at a nearby table turned pale and lethally respectable stares their way. Sam raised his glass to them, threw Jamie a mocking smile then drank half his second pint.
‘You just can’t go doing that to people,’ he said.
‘Doing what?’
‘You know what I mean. Not even animals behave like that.’
‘Most animals pair for life,’ Jamie quipped. ‘Or die within the year.’
Sam merely paused, glass half-way to his lips and said softly, ‘quite.’
The superior smile died on Jamie’s lips.
‘How often have you done that?’ Sam asked him.
‘What?’
‘You want me to spell it out?’
‘Go on.’
‘You know. Picked someone up.’
‘You picked me up,’ Jamie insisted. This at least was true, but Sam reacted as if Jamie had thrown beer in his face. He turned sharply aside and seemed to make a great effort to calm himself. Once again Jamie had the sensation that he was about to lash out with the flat of his hand, but Sam merely exhaled heavily, forcing himself under control.