Four New Words for Love

by Michael Cannon

  The mass finishes. The sombre procession filters out, the pews emptying in order. Sister Judith nods in the direction of the departing cortège. He interprets this as an indication that they will meet outside. He waits until the last of the mourners passes and stands to follow. George is standing at the church entrance, with a woman who looks remarkably like a healthy version of Felicity, shaking hands with the mourners in turn. Christopher didn’t anticipate this, or an undisclosed sister who has only now materialised. She shakes his hand first and seems pleased to see the end of the line. In her relief she makes some brief pleasantry he only half catches, confused by her intonation. New Zealand? He turns to George. They shake hands sombrely. He is trying to think of something appropriate to say. George speaks first.

  ‘Sorry old boy, it’s friends and family only.’

  ‘I... I’m sorry, I don’t’

  ‘At the crematorium. It’s friends and family only.’

  George is watching Christopher’s confusion intently. This handshaking may be a Catholic convention, but it occurs to Christopher that George has gone along with it solely to orchestrate this moment. He holds on to Christopher’s hand till he’s satisfied that the whole effect has been registered, lets go and turns to the woman who has the good grace to look embarrassed by the exchange. Dismissed, Christopher walks into the sunshine and Sister Judith.

  ‘We’ve got a mini bus. There’s room.’

  This gives the lie to George’s assertion.

  ‘You’re very kind but I can’t...’

  ‘I thought it was all decided.’

  ‘George says it’s friends and family only.’

  ‘What utter bollocks! What a nerve! Friends and family? When you come to think of it he’s been neither to her. Do you want me to have a word with him?’

  ‘No. Please. The last thing I want to do is hector my way in. It’s not what she would have wanted.’

  ‘She never got what she wanted from him. I don’t see why he should thwart her one more time.’

  He fans his fingers apologetically and walks on. At another burst of drizzle he turns his jacket collar up. He has left his umbrella behind, but isn’t about to go back and give George the satisfaction again. He reasons with himself that he’s said his goodbyes, that that isn’t really her, just a skin bag of organs in a box, but the colossal unfairness of it strikes him and he reluctantly admits to himself that he is hurt.

  He doesn’t want to go home carrying this sensation with him. He stops for lunch in a trattoria in Greek Street, eats without relish, and, still numbed from the encounter, threads his way in the direction of St James’s Park, feeling the need for space among the unaccustomed crush. The park doesn’t dispel his low spirits. He walks to the river, hugging it to cross at Vauxhall Bridge. He finds a bench in Lambeth for a half hour’s reflection, gets up and continues walking. In his mind he is trying to revive the last few conversations he had with her, but she is already receding. With the speed of the foot traffic increasing around him, he realises both that he is completely exhausted, and that if he doesn’t get a move on he’ll be caught in the homeward rush.

  He has made his way along the south bank, to cross at Waterloo Bridge, and stops to rest on the approach. Beside him is a woman in baggy shapeless clothes, leaning against some kind of collapsed cardboard structure, awaiting assembly once the pedestrians have passed. Her face is partially hidden by a hood. Beneath this her hair hangs in clotted points. Her movements are slow and he recognises that she, too, is exhausted. The cardboard is a beige rectangle; she is trying to improvise some kind of three-dimensional shelter. He looks at its porosity and the looming sky. She almost succeeds when a man bangs into it, collapsing the structure, walking on briskly with a backward cluck of impatience. She lets the cardboard fold to a two dimensional mat and sits, hunched.

  ‘Why stop on a bridge?’

  ‘Why anywhere?’ She doesn’t look up but has obviously been aware of him. She now looks up, past him, wearily stands and begins gathering her things.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I’m being moved.’

  ‘Moved where?’

  ‘If you have to ask you don’t understand.’

  The policeman draws abreast of them.

  ‘Move along.’

  ‘Where? Move where? She’s here because of a lack of alternatives.’

  ‘I could give you a list of moderately priced B&Bs. Where? How the fuck should I know. Any fucking where as long as it’s not here.’

  He has grown up with and subscribed to the myth of the English bobby, tipping his helmet, dispensing directions, admonishing naughty schoolboys. He looks at her fatigue, the policeman’s impatience, the treatment she accepts without complaint and the chasm of her world momentarily yawns. He feels a sense of horrible vertigo. He has always held an opinion of himself as a good person, but goodness is only manifested in acts of kindness. Potential goodness is of no use to anyone. His empty rooms. Her exposure. It’s a tiny example of the aggregate of inequality, but it comes within his compass to rectify. He can’t walk away from her and continue to think of himself the same way again.

  ‘Come back with me. There’s space. We’ll... we’ll work something out.’

  She looks at him properly this time, intently gauging his sincerity. Perhaps, he thinks, she is evaluating the risks. He doesn’t think he looks sinister, and perhaps the fact that the offer has been made in front of a policeman will weigh her decision. The policeman’s growing impatience is manifest. A curtain of rain patters up the river and drums on her cardboard. In her eyes there is something terrible, a vitality extinguished, that sharpens his resolve. His anger at his treatment, by George, and hers, here, has honed itself to a single function.

  ‘Please.’

  ‘And take this crap with you.’ While saying this the policeman prods at one of her bags with his foot. For a moment her attention shifts from Christopher to the dull boot and follows the line of the uniform up. The eyes beneath the helmet brim are slitted against the rain, the face devoid of expression. She turns back to Christopher. The discrepancy is sufficient prompt.

  She picks up the various bags littered around her, folds the cardboard into a giant envelope under her arm, and nods imperceptibly to Christopher to lead. He bends into the rain checking every twenty or so strides that she is still in his wake. At the other side of the river he fully expects her to disappear. She follows at a cautionary distance all the way to Charing Cross. He buys a second ticket to complement his return.

  They sit side by side, partitioned by her defensive cardboard, silent. At the other side he hails a taxi. He is so tired she has to help him with the exchange of money. Deborah must have been in to see to the dog. He is glad of the warm lozenges of light, thrown out by the stained glass of the front door. The dog greets them both enthusiastically. She leaves the cardboard in the hall and takes inventory.

  ‘You live alone?’

  ‘Yes. Well, there’s the dog.’

  He walks into the kitchen. Behind him, unseen, she opens the lounge door with her foot and looks quickly inside, glancing back to ensure her path of exit to the front door is unimpeded. She follows him warily into the kitchen and reconnoitres.

  ‘I was going to make us both something to eat but I’m suddenly very tired.’ His voice comes from inside the fridge. He is foraging. He straightens up. His tiredness isn’t sudden, she’s been watching it overtake him for the past hour. ‘I’m really sorry, I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m going to have to go to bed. Feel free to make yourself whatever you want.’

  ‘Can I have a bath?’

  ‘Of course. The door to the spare room’s open. You can’t miss it.’

  The dog follows him. As it lies solidly across his legs he hears the movement downstairs, then upstairs, as she moves from room to room, stopping on the landing outside his door. Her movements perplex him. Why stop there to stare at his door?

  She isn’t. Directly above her head is a trap door to the atti
c. She suspects one of those sliding ladder arrangements. Satisfying herself it looks undisturbed, she collects her cache of bags from the hall.

  She lies down in the warm water and contemplates the twin islands of her breasts. She is reasoning: his age, his fatigue; if his circumstances are as he has made out it is he who has made himself the more vulnerable of the two.

  He is drifting off when he hears from the bathroom the intermittent humming of a nursery rhyme.

  * * *

  He wakes to a sound it takes him a minute to identify: the spin cycle of the washing machine. The dog, having other stimulation, has already gone downstairs. He can tell by the quality of light that it is late, perhaps mid-morning. The bathroom towels, piled pell mell on the wicker basket, have disappeared. Fresh towels stand stacked in the alcove. He feels slightly aggrieved. After his morning ritual he comes down to the smell of fresh coffee. She is reading yesterday’s paper. The world is somehow different, less monochrome.

  ‘What is it that’s missing?’

  ‘Dust. I don’t know how you saw the telly.’

  ‘I’ll have to take the dog out.’

  ‘He’s already had a piss in the garden.’

  Last night she slept with the chair wedged beneath the door handle, barricading herself against the unknown. At the sight of him she realises how unnecessary her precaution has been.

  He straightens his tie, sips the offered coffee. Beneath the table her plastic bags have been replaced with new ones. He correctly guesses she has washed all the contents, prepared in readiness for an imminent departure. It seems a miserable cache. The few garments he can see looked washed out.

  ‘If you need to buy some clothes...’ disingenuously producing his wallet.

  ‘That didn’t take long.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ He whistles to the dog, and, misunderstood, takes to the common.

  * * *

  The warning signs around the pond seem superfluous: it has shrunk to a muddy puddle surrounded by a corona of greenish mud. He stares at the forlorn patch and wonders. Conceivably she’s young enough to be his granddaughter, but more likely could have been his daughter if they’d started late. He wouldn’t have minded. No – that won’t do. It’s not just that he wouldn’t have minded, a decision of that gravity isn’t made by negation, he was prepared. He would have embraced the obligations.

  Leaving the breakfast table that morning something in her voice made him stop. Something had snagged, a rehearsed sentence that didn’t flow as intended. He had turned, asked her to repeat it. Her use of the past tense confused him. He had touched her hand, palm downward, on the table surface. And with the slightest of motions he saw that she steeled herself for the contact and he understood. Nothing had been lost. She wasn’t ever prepared for sacrifices. She had taken a decision without him and was informing him in the aftermath. The news was delivered strategically as he was on his way out, to preclude further discussion.

  He had gone into the city as he had done every professional day of his life. He remembers people, hordes and hordes he saw every other day without noticing, disembarking from trains, buying newspapers, hurrying to destinations. All of these people he would never know and who, like him, had something in common: the privilege of having arrived. The buildings were grey, the sky overcast. ‘This place is terrible,’ he murmured to himself, without doubting his desire to introduce someone of his own. And he had disguised the vacuum within himself so competently, earning a reputation for industry because he could not tolerate the introspection that inactivity admitted, that he thought himself a fraud.

  He didn’t think he’d have been found wanting as a father. He imagined the care he’d have taken. And that girl, in his house, how much care has she lacked to find herself alone on a bridge keeping the world at bay with cardboard? She has the look of someone not loved enough when it matters most. It marks them, indelibly. He cannot say what it is but he can spot it without fail. He has been foolish. He has made an offer to her with the same whimsy that he adopted the dog, and a human being isn’t a dog.

  When he returns she is standing in the hall with her coat on, festooned with bags in readiness.

  ‘I didn’t know if you had house keys.’

  ‘You don’t have to go.’

  ‘Thanks for the accommodation and the chance to clean up.’

  ‘Look.’ He spreads his palms, a telling gesture for those who know him. ‘We got off to the wrong start. Offering you money was stupid, genuine but stupid. I didn’t intend to compromise you. This house is too large for two, never mind one. You’d be going out to the same thing as yesterday. You’ve already dusted. If you’re prepared to clean we can work something out, as long as you don’t embark on the antiseptic crusade my wife did. Can you cook?’

  ‘Bits.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you cook bits, and clean more, and if you don’t like it you don’t have to stay?’ She turns from him to stare at the spot beneath the stairs where the dog has torn her cardboard to shreds. He presses the sensed advantage. ‘Consider it a trial – on both sides. All the risk is mine. You might abscond with...’ He looks around this interior, contrived for someone else, to find something he actually cares for. ‘...The wine.’ For the first time there is the premonition of a smile playing around the corners of her mouth. ‘What do you have to lose?’ He waves towards the world on the other side of the door. ‘It’s always waiting for you – whatever it is.’

  She drops her parcels, one by one, falling berries, and shrugs off her coat.

  ‘The dog needs wormed.’

  ‘I hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘I don’t know if he ever had one and I wouldn’t presume to give him one.’

  ‘Gina.’

  ‘He’s a dog, not a bitch.’

  ‘I’m Gina.’

  ‘Oh... Christopher.’

  ‘I know.’

  * * *

  Christopher now has a new routine. He is reluctant to relinquish his new-found self-sufficiency but does so for her sake, reasoning that if she opts to leave he can always go back to the way things were. She immerses herself in Marjory’s cookery books, bought solely for display, and absorbs the numerous cooking programmes on television. Marjory’s meals were utilitarian, prepared without relish to fill a void and minimise mess. Dishes were removed the instant the last morsel was lifted from them. Sometimes, if she finished first, he even found himself chewing quicker to shorten her wait. Gina cooks with flair and an additional ingredient he hasn’t yet identified: the love of it. She’s a quick learner. The meals improve daily. He senses a latent talent she has never had the resources to exploit.

  ‘This isn’t a working kitchen. It’s what someone who doesn’t cook thinks it is.’ She’s unpacking to the table as she speaks: milk, eggs, carrots encrusted in authentic dirt, a brain of vivid broccoli, purple garlic, creamy scallops fringed in orange corals, steaks bleeding lightly into their greaseproof paper, the yellow disc of a lemon flan, a truckle of cheese. There is no need to display them so, they could be packed straight from bag to fridge, but he senses this fan of ingredients satisfies some inner aesthetic of texture and colour, and perhaps the realisation of being able to spend. ‘Steak all right? I’ve gone for sirloin. You can afford it. I told him...’ she demonstrates a width with parted forefinger and thumb, ‘and watched him cut them. And it’s marbled, like they say on the telly.’

  She is happy to haunt the food shops in the High Street, and beyond, and somehow feeds the two of them better and more cheaply than he succeeded in feeding himself. She is scrupulous with his money and embarrasses him every second night with a conscientious rendering of accounts. The coffee bar of his last meeting with Vanessa has absorbed the vacated premises next door and sprouted an adjunct delicatessen. The new staff seem a similar age to her and similarly enthused. She comes back, vivid with contained excitement and the news that they have offered her a probationary position. It is the first time he has seen that look temporar
ily dispelled from her eyes. Even if it doesn’t work out it can only be beneficial. She returns alternative nights with artichoke hearts for him, olives the colour of aubergines that shine in their oily lustre, sun-dried tomatoes that draw saliva from his mouth, and marinated squid rings that challenge his teeth. He feels this is a protracted thank you in place of the words she can’t muster, for, aside from the exchange of niceties, they seldom talk of anything of any moment. He is aware of her constant need for activity, similar to his when presented with the news of the abortion. He has observed her in the slack times, when whatever small distraction she has fastened on has worn thin, or at the end of their day, when he is watching the late news, the best of her energies gone. At such times the animation that has been slowly suffusing her over these weeks deserts her face and she can look plain, ugly even. In her abstraction she loses awareness or control of her features; vertical creases appear between the brows and the eyes adopt an expression of hopeless dismay, as if remembering a vast internal confusion. It’s painful to see, and he feels he’s being given a glimpse of something she wouldn’t want revealed, a door left guilelessly ajar, in the absorption of whatever torments her. So he calls her back to the here and now with the offer of a hot drink, or local trivia, and she gathers herself and schools her features, until the next time.

  There is an ever newer routine. Who, he says to himself, said you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? He rises at eight. She has already staked her claim to the upstairs bathroom. He puffs down the stairs in his dressing gown to the downstairs toilet, and back up fifteen minutes later with two cups of Earl Grey, knocking gently to deliver hers to a disembodied hand, accepted like Excalibur through the steaming gap. He inherits a bathroom that mists his glasses on contact. He has to wipe the sweating mirror to shave. Her hygiene is obsessive, as if trying to rid herself of something. Only once has he passed to the front bedroom to see her retreating form, pulling down an inappropriately brief dress. He has reinstated the daily paper he let lapse and will read her fragments aloud while she cooks, or set the table to her shouted instructions. She settles in front of a television that bores him. He goes through to read in the front room until the last walk with the dog.