by David Rees
Jason poured himself another coffee. ‘You were crazy!’
‘He wasn’t mean with his money, what little he had. So I didn’t mind, though I’d say it was a relationship of unequal dependences, and that, eventually, spells trouble. What really annoyed me was after he graduated: he made no serious effort to look for a job. I nagged, but it was useless. Then I went off to Canada for two months and left him behind. I wasn’t going to subsidise his holidays too. When I came back he’d got himself a job all right. In Leeds. So he fucked off, and that was the last I heard of him. He never had any intention of finding work near where we lived, never was going to stop so long that he’d have to pay for something! I was tricked all the way along the line! I’ll not forgive him for that.’
‘It still hurts?’
‘Yes. We all get hurt at least once in a lifetime. I said it was a relationship of unequal dependences. Well … I was the dependent one. I only found that out afterwards.’
‘Like Mark.’
Ted nodded. ‘Like Mark.’
‘But you weren’t tempted to try the valium and whisky cure?’
‘No. No … I just whored around, I had a fling with Malcolm, and all I can say about him is that he fucked like a donkey.’ Jason raised an eyebrow. Ted smiled, then said, ‘That’s not the whole truth … there were other things. So I got hurt once more, but not so much. You develop… a kind of immunity. Then I met Alan.’
‘Security inside yourself.’
‘But you lose something on the way.’
Jason tucked into the scrambled eggs. ‘Yes. Well … when I’ve eaten this, we can go upstairs and discover how far off break-up we are.’
‘I thought you said you were so weary you could hardly move.’
‘I just want your arms round me in bed so I can fall asleep like that.’ He began to sing,You’re the one that I want. ‘Let’s go to Benjy’s tonight.’
‘Don’t you ever get tired of dancing?’
‘No.’
‘Nor do I,’ Ted admitted. ‘Not since I discovered how good it can be. And that’s thanks to you.’
‘Your letter was very welcome,’ Helen wrote, ‘though as you guessed it disturbed me greatly. Where do I start? A whole crowd of points in my head jostle for attention and make me feel it’s impossible to focus them ― whatever I say in a few lines is bound to be trite. It isn’t necessary to enumerate the reasons why it’s not worth desperation. What happened to you sounds like a state of mind, induced logically and illogically from the previous events, in which all other issues are clouded and the feeling of self-disgust is mirrored by the sense of failure, rejection, and futility. Your own value, in your eyes and those of others, seemed at that time to be lessened. This inflicts a sense of hurt deeper even than that caused by rejection and the loss of secure love, and then one faces the question: not ― can I go on? Clearly one can. But ― to what end? I don’t propose to list the choices ― you are well aware of the answers. I’m convinced you will find a balance and that you have the potential to achieve real happiness again. As far as I’m concerned, there are obvious limits to the amount I can help you. I fear the support system must be insufficient if you need a safety net at two a.m. You were probably right not to phone ― Brian would not have been all that sympathetic ― but I’m sorry not to have been able to assist at a nadir point. However, you know that the will to help is not switched off ― it’s there the whole time, and I can only hope the knowledge of that may contribute towards getting you through the bad periods. I’ve told you you’re not accountable to me. The only thing that would make me think less of you is your looking favourably on that bottle of pills, or anything comparable.
‘Your descriptions of Amman interested me, and I laughed at the “men-o-pause” … Donald was here yesterday and we spent an hour chatting about nothing in particular, our parents, a bit about you, though there wasn’t much to say that hadn’t been said before. Determination not to be committed, not to have any binding relationships, not to face questions like “When will I see you again?” His attitude is that if you and he are to see each other, it might as well be made as pleasant and unstressful as possible. I’m sure I’m not telling you anything you don’t know already. It was a fairly superficial chat; he seemed quite well and relatively cheerful, though not wildly happy or energetic. Is he ever these days? He knows my views, and will shrug his metaphorical shoulders and do something else.
‘All is well here, despite Angela falling into a blackberry bush. Really, that child is so clumsy! Why didn’t my husband bequeath her some of his agility? Brian has been busy in the garden and is becoming increasingly peppery with colleagues at work, though we had a pleasant weekend (weather not bad for once this foul summer) ― Saturday at Greenwich and Sunday with my parents.’
Brian wrote more tersely. ‘It appears that you are splenetic; I do sympathise for I feel you have some cause. But it’s most unprofitable and fearfully bad for the digestion. Seriously; I have no solution, for, as we both know, you and I are wholly opposite in temperament. I too have experienced sad sour times, and I found that all one achieves ― or suffers ― or realises ― is an erosion.
‘One is diminished. The exercise of anger reduces the capacity for affection or love. It is not extravagant to see in any man a whole measure which he may decant as he pleases into bile or choler, or into another human being. You hardly want nor need a lecture from me, but, to be quite plain, the object of your affections isn’t worth the effort. He really is not! By all means smash an entire dinner service ― the satisfaction is momentary ― and the replacement cost excessive. Or join the Foreign Legion, or the Trappists, but fretting at an unhealed wound…
‘I’m going back to my tomatoes. Helen is still writing. It must be emphatic stuff ― the table wobbles, biro-stabbed. ‘
I’ve known Mark for seventeen years, he said to himself, and this is the first time I’ve written him a letter.
Helen said, ‘Mark thinks the only predictable aspect of Donald’s behaviour is that it’s consistently and totally unpredictable. I wouldn’t agree with him. My brother is becoming banal.’
‘Yes,’ Brian answered. ‘I wouldn’t live with that sort of nonsense.’
‘We know most of the layers of our particular onion, I guess. The sharing, the nights in, the nights out, the jokes no one else understands … being conscious of what we each think before we’re even thinking it. Nothing inscrutable about us.’
‘Nothing?’
‘Except perhaps the absolute centre of you. You showed me some of that the other day.’
‘Ah. My inability to understand the faggery-haggery.’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t want to discuss that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Helen! Don’t provoke me!’
Helen, shopping further afield than usual found herself in Tottenham. Donald was outside the place where their mother worked, loading some boxes into the Fiat. She paused; the last thing she wanted at that moment was a conversation with her brother. She decided to avoid him by going into the church nearby; maybe there was a door on the other side of it through which she could slip out. Last night, in bed, she and Brian had experienced something that was almost like a serious quarrel. It seemed to reveal a part of his character she did not approve of, the existence of which she hadn’t noticed since they were teenagers.
One of the greatest joys of this second relationship with Brian ― so she thought ― was their sensitivity to each other. Unlike when they were at school, they were aware of shifts of mood almost before such changes happened; there was, she considered, a complete naturalness about the way their giving and taking slotted together. Yet last night he had been extraordinarily insensitive. There was no doubt that he was jealous of her friendship with Mark. Not, of course, sexually; he wasn’t so stupid as to think a gay man posed any threat of that kind: it was a realisation that Mark had qualities he had not, that touched something in her which he could not satisfy.
&nbs
p; ‘Talking about it,’ she said, ‘means you aren’t keeping it to yourself; you’re telling me, the sympathetic listener.’
‘And I wish I wasn’t!’ Brian answered.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’
She thought for a moment. ‘Neither do I.’ she admitted.
‘Well… that’s bad.’
‘Is it really important?’
‘Oh yes, Helen, it is!’
‘What do you want me to do? Not see Mark? Forbid him to come to the house?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’
‘Well… what?’
‘I don’t want you to do anything in particular.’
‘I’ve known Mark as long as I’ve known you,’ she said. ‘But when I was at university, and for a couple of years after, I didn’t know you at all. I went on seeing Mark of course … he was my brother’s lover, for God’s sake! So there’s a whole pattern of shared experiences in which you didn’t participate … parties, trips to the theatre, old friends, and so on. Yes, Mark and I do need each other; I miss him if weeks go by without even a phone call. It’s not painful, missing him ― it’s not like you being away. But he’s in the fabric of my existence. I can’t alter that.’
‘It’s incomprehensible to me! You, the children, my house, my garden: that’s my private world. I don’t like anybody else being part of it. Oh, I don’t mean I’m anti-social, that I hate seeing friends, but… sometimes I feel I’m sharing my wife with another man.’
This last remark shocked her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But I don’t know what to do about it. The letter I wrote to Mark … I showed it to you. I stressed that my sympathies, my ability to help, had clear limitations.’
‘Did you? I got the opposite impression.’
‘Brian! Really!’
‘Yes. Really.’ He turned over, pulling the quilt round himself, and switched off the light. She lay awake for a long time. It was a fuss about nothing in her opinion, a mirage in Brian’s head. And this bothered her. She had never seen him before as someone likely to be a prey to fantasies; he always had such a firm grip on real, practical things. That intuitiveness they shared; it was not so perfect after all. How well did she know him? He had lived with, then married, a woman she knew almost nothing about. And the years from nineteen to twenty-four were, in anybody’s life, rich with experience; no wonder she caught Mark’s eye or glanced at Donald when a reference was made to some detail from the past which only they knew. Why couldn’t Brian understand and accept?
The church, the summer sun streaming through its windows, was a mass of subtle lights and shadows. The warmth of its stone! She listened to its whispers, absorbed its peace.
Then she almost literally bumped into her father, who was coming out of the vestry. ‘Hullo, hullo, hullo!’ he boomed, shattering a century of calm. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Just passing through.’
‘I’m arranging a deal with the vicar. He’s going to flog me the lead from the roof!’ His laugh echoed round the vault.
‘How’s Donald?’ She remembered words from a prayer: beware of loud and aggressive persons for they are vexatious to the spirit.
‘Moving to Liverpool. Miles away! He’s actually got a job at last, in independent radio. Standing on his own two feet for once, thank God. Even for small mercies. I don’t know how Mark’s taking it.’
And you’re not particularly worried, Helen thought. ‘He’s in Jordan,’ she said. ‘I had a postcard yesterday from Ma’an.’
Jordan! Well, it’s all right for some. Can’t stop, Helen. I’m meeting a friend for lunch.’ He winked. ‘A liquid lunch.’
She left him and went outside. A tree in bloom, sunlight, lilac, stone. I must talk to Brian, she said to herself.
FIVE
Jordan did not heal his wounds, but it was at least a novel and exciting experience. He left England on the last day of July and returned at the end of August, fit and well, his inward eye full of landscapes more spectacular, savage and barren than anything he had ever seen or imagined. Nor did the men-o-pause last long. He went to bed with a young Australian he met in Amman: ‘He turned me on fantastically.’ he said later to Helen, deliberately echoing Donald’s words about Rick.
The Australian took him to the Dead Sea, which was so saline he found he could sit on it. They drove to Aqaba, and stopped by the rock Moses struck to bring water to the desert: Mark struck it too ― it was a logan-stone balanced on the top of an artesian well ― and water trickled. By the Hejaz railway he saw a rusting train lying on its side; it had been blown up by T.E. Lawrence and his companions in the First World War. Nobody, in over half a century, had bothered to remove it. At Petra, the extraordinary beauty of the houses and the palaces, carved out of the mountains long before the birth of Christ, moved him to tears. He watched an elderly Arab woman digging in the sand: she found an ancient Nabataean pot, and he bought it from her. It was nearly three thousand years old. He and the Australian ate couscous that night with some wandering Arabs, and slept together in the open air on the sand, outside one of Petra’s temples. This is as far from the existence I’ve lived, he said to himself, as I’ve ever been. Dressed only in shorts, his skin the colour of mahogany, hair bleached white by the sun, he was almost unrecognizable. And elated. For the first time in ten years a day could pass when he did not think of Donald.
So, back in Amman, he was astonished, almost shocked, to find Donald had written to him. Helen, agreeing for once to be a post office, had mailed the letter. “I love you. I love you and want you back. I’ll give you a second honeymoon, a horn of plenty. I promise,’ An insurance policy, he said to himself, the result of defeat; ‘I promise’ Donald could say as easily as ‘Pass the marmalade.’
At home in a cool, green, wet September, he looked for Donald at his lodgings, but he had gone without leaving a forwarding address. Ringing Jane told him why. ‘He’s got a job in Liverpool,’ she said. ‘Something to do with the local radio station. Yes, it was on the spur of the moment … but I must say Chris and I are very happy about it. Two years with no work! Perhaps he’ll settle down a bit now.’
‘When did he leave?’
‘Oh … a fortnight ago.’
‘Can I phone him? Do you have his address?’
‘I’m not sure where he’s living; he didn’t even know himself when he went.’
‘Do you have his work number?’
‘Yes.’ There was a long pause, then she said, ‘Mark … he asked me, only yesterday, not to give it to you.’
How to cope with a grief? In much the same ways as anybody else, he supposed, and he remembered the time when he thought a death would have been easier, not because of the sympathy he might receive, but because he’d know Donald was not in bed with a lover. It was not so appalling now: he’d got used to the process. These months of break-up had left him drained; never again would he have to face the raw, bleeding emotions of loss so unprepared and vulnerable. He slept at nights. He went out looking for sex ― something he’d never had to do before. It was often a waste of time and money, he thought; hanging around in discos and bars buying drinks. And a condom did take the edge off the pleasure. But nothing was as bad as when Donald was there unable to decide whether to go or to stay. The red Fiat was not outside Rick’s flat, and they could not accidentally meet in the pubs and clubs. Donald, absent, could no longer be agent provocateur to goad him to a violence that could find no outlet, ultimately, except by turning it against himself. He could at least exist.
‘Our days of sunshine and happiness,’ Donald had said in a letter the Christmas after they first met, ‘when every day will be summer for us, together all day and every day, they seem so far in the future it frightens me. I AM SELFISH. I want you NOW, for ever, to rule over, to be mine alone, to keep safe by me, never to let go, to make you happier than you’ve ever been. If I should lose you I think I should die, possibly by my own hand.
‘I love you, my love, so very much. I love you
, I love you.’
He did not, on any single occasion, Mark said to himself, make me happier than I’d ever been. I’ve been happier eating good meals with Helen. Did he, at any time, really love me?
He did not, Mark decided, despite those words. True, he thought he meant what he said. But they were the words of a hysteric, and they rang false ― ‘If I should lose you I think I should die, possibly by my own hand.’ In another letter Donald had written, ‘All the time now I’m thinking about cottages in the country with dogs, a garden, roses, and naturally and primarily, you.’ Sweet dreams. Paper roses. Despite the naturally and the primarily, the ‘you’ was an afterthought. Donald only loved him for what he had to offer. But I’m rewriting history, he told himself; it’s the only way I can come to terms with it.
‘All he’s worried about now,’ Jason said, ‘is whether you’re taking care of what bits of furniture belong to him. and whether ― if you should meet him by accident ― you’ll be polite.’
‘Did he want to know how I was? What I’m doing? Ask if I had a new lover? Anything?’
‘No.’
Christmas morning; Jason was doing the rounds of his friends north of the river, a drink with each. He and Ted were having guests to dinner in the afternoon. Mark was going to his parents and was not looking forward to it; Christmas in Croydon was not an exciting prospect. ‘I’m a person,’ he said, ‘who hopes my lover will behave in the same way as I do. No… not just hopes, I assume he does. Obviously that’s a mistake. I shall have to learn to be more suspicious.’
It’s a mistake ― if that’s the right word, and I’m not sure that it is ― which everybody makes.’
‘Everybody?’
‘Some, then.’
‘I assume he has a similar moral code, a similar view of responsibilities.’
‘You think if you were Donald you’d have behaved differently?’