She looks at her phone. The screen has gone dark but she knows his number is still there, waiting to be dialled. The obvious thing to do is apologise for doing this to him. She ought to have asked him first, or at the very least given him some warning. She could tell him it was a joke, or a test; in either case a mistake. She could promise to go to the hairdresser’s first thing in the morning and get them to put it back the way it was.
She clears the screen on her phone and stands up, pours the sickly-sweet remains of the coffee into the sink. She rinses the cup and begins opening cupboard doors again, vaguely aware that what she needs is proper food. But the phone still draws her and she wonders whether it’s another kind of nourishment she is looking for. She has good friends, several of them, in for the long haul. They have nursed her though bumps and fractures in relationships, and she has done the same for them. She knows she has their support through thick and thin. But she can anticipate their responses too well. They will approve her behaviour and condemn his, and what is happening here is somehow more complex than that. This is a vital step on her journey, and her instinct is to face it squarely, and on her own.
She thinks about the two women who showed her around the New York projects she went over there to see. One was her age, the other a few years older. Neither of them dyed their hair. And although the subject never arose in conversations, it was their example that gave her the strength to carry out her resolve. It wasn’t a sudden decision, after all, but something she had been approaching for a long, long time.
He has cleared up the kitchen but not the living room, which she finds littered with newspapers and coffee cups and the empty packets from trail mix and popcorn. There are DVDs and their brittle cases all around the TV, and there is a snug, cushioned hollow in the centre of the sofa like a nest that some large, heavy beast has made. Is it evidence for her new hypothesis? Are these the signs of a man in a state of defeat, sinking gradually into resignation and torpor?
But in his study she finds comfort. It is a small room, which was her conservatory in a previous life, and it hordes his various smells. The predominant one is of stale cigarette ends, but there are undertones of musk and methane and licorice, merging into a combination that is unique to him. The desk is a chaos of notes and print-outs, but the rest of the room is tidy. The books on their custom-made shelves are lined up in precise order of height, the printer paper and spare cartridges are neatly stacked, and the unruly snarl of computer wires that tangle beneath her own desk are here disciplined into thick, neat bundles with cable ties. It is all in order and it reassures her. He has not disappeared from her life. He will come back here.
She carries her bag up to the bedroom and drops it at the foot of the bed. She needs to keep moving. She is afraid that if she keeps still for too long she will suffocate. It is not a new fear. She has always had it, and it is one of the reasons she chose the career she did. Being on her own never suited her. She has always been lost without someone around to reassure her that she still exists.
It is one of the first things that arose when she entered therapy. Her analyst seldom made suggestions, preferring to allow talk and reflection to bring clients to their own solutions. But this client did not spend time in reflection, and he had to suggest to her that she did; that she build some downtime into her life and spend it on her own.
She saw the wisdom in this but she never did get around to doing it. On the few evenings when she was not out at a party or a dinner she met friends and went to the theatre or the cinema, and on the even rarer occasions when she was alone in the house she invariably used the time to catch up with more distant family and friends on the phone. She thinks of this again now. She could ring someone just for a chat – she needn’t even go into her own situation, but just listen and maybe get her mind back into gear for the other things that are happening in her life. But again she resists going beyond herself for help.
She turns on the bedside radio so that she will have voices to listen to, and begins to unpack.
Years of publicity tours have taught her to be a well-organised traveller. She has all her washing in a cotton bag, separated by a section of her case from the clean things. She empties the bag into the laundry basket and drops it in on top, then begins to unpack the rest. She puts her underwear into its drawer, then opens the wardrobe to hang up her dresses and jeans. But something that is lurking in there takes her breath away and she freezes, an empty hanger in her hand.
She had thought that his leaving like that had brought her to the depths of humiliation, but she sees now that there is still further to go. The garment that she sees there pushes her beyond humiliation and into the realms of degradation. It is a short black linen skirt, entirely innocuous. If they were both knocked over by a bus the next day they need have not the slightest fear that their executors would find anything here that revealed any details of their sexual life together. They didn’t use sex toys or blue movies. They were a respectable middle-class couple with no dirty secrets. But that skirt, for her, told its own story.
{14}
He was amazed by her interest in him, and at the same time, deeply mistrustful of it. He had a girlfriend of a sort at the time, but both of them knew the relationship was going nowhere and it wasn’t hard for him to extricate himself from it. He took great care that this new flame should never see where he lived, in a dingy ex-council flat that he shared with a constant turnover of Irish students and labourers and musicians, all passing through. By day he worked on his poems in one of several favourite libraries throughout the city, and by night he either joined his flatmates on their pub crawls or stayed at home and wrestled with demons. He lived on social security, occasionally supplemented by very small advances, paltry payments from poetry journals or competition winnings. Some months his postage expenditure was higher than his income from poetry. Every year he applied for every award, grant and bursary that was going. Once he got a thousand pounds from the Society of Authors by forging a doctor’s note saying he was suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome and unable to write. The travel grant from the Arts Council that enabled him to go to Australia just about covered his return flight and the barest of hostel accommodation, but it was the largest cheque he had ever received in his life.
So was that why he loved her? Because she had lifted him not only out of obscurity but out of poverty as well? How could there be any possibility of real love developing when the relationship had begun on such an unequal footing? When he had entered it carrying such an enormous debt of gratitude?
He took a long drag from his cigarette, surprised to discover that he had lit one after all, with absolutely no awareness that he was doing it. The gods again. Hades in secret governance of his actions. Was there ever such a thing as free will?
But she loved him. For her own reasons she needed him as much as he needed her. She needed his vision of the world; his willingness to face the blood and guts of existence and grapple with their meaning, and to show her the way to do it, too. She said he was her prince, come to rescue her from the saccharine dream of her media existence. She needed him to help her move forward into a new way of being. Money was worthless when life was meaningless. And so the long talks they had, the walks on the heath, the weekend trips to Ireland and Wales to breathe mountain air or sail inshore waters, these were his repayments to her, and were of equal value to what she did for him.
The playing field was level.
{15}
She was forty-one when they met. She’d had plenty of lovers before, but with him she discovered a passion she had never experienced. She believed it was because of their intrinsic compatibility, and that she had finally met her soulmate. Her analyst agreed, but a straight-talking American author she went on tour with told her it was common among women of her age to feel like that. She said the passion was caused by the body going all out for a last shot at reproduction before the menopause set in.
She chose to believe the first interpretation, but a few years later she
was forced to reconsider. He was tolerant of the symptoms of her menopause, although he said they gave him strange dreams; of salamanders; of being boiled alive in a cannibal’s cauldron; of sleeping in a tent that had caught fire. He was tolerant, too, of her waning desire, and they talked endlessly about sex and the significance of it in relationships, and for humankind as a whole, and about the different attitudes men and women have towards it. They talked about the sublimation of it as well, and about the potential of unexpended sexual energy as a creative or motivational force. They experimented with tantric practices but discovered, after a few weeks, that they took up more time and stamina than either of them was willing to expend. So they tried a period of celibacy, just to see what would happen.
It bothered him a lot less than it bothered her, or at least, that’s the way it seemed to her. She didn’t feel much in the way of desire, and she didn’t miss the physical act at all, but she couldn’t bear it that he didn’t appear to miss it either. She had sleepless nights, terrified that he had found, or soon would find, someone else to sleep with. She felt less than human, and that her power in the relationship had evaporated. And so it was that she came up with the idea, and bought the little black skirt to try it out. She put it on one night, along with one of his white shirts and the tie he had bought for a prize-giving dinner. Their celibacy came to a sudden and dramatic end.
{16}
He is thinking about sex as well, but not about the schoolgirl outfit. Every twenty seconds, was it? No. Minutes, surely. Every twenty minutes throughout the day, that was how often men were supposed to think about sex.
But he isn’t sure whether this way of thinking about sex really counts. He has an image in his mind of a man who masturbates so frequently that he has no fertile seed left for procreation. The man is himself, but the image does not relate to his sexual proclivities. It refers to his literary ones.
He is thinking again about The Turf Shed, and he is thinking about Salamander, the volume that followed it four years later. Between them they sold more copies than his other four collections put together, but it didn’t necessarily mean they were better. They sold because of what she had done for him, because he was as close to being in the public eye as a poet could hope to be, and because his presence in the media was consistently maintained.
But the things that have brought him success have also sucked the lifeblood from his poetry. He spends a lot of time away from home, teaching courses, attending conferences, giving readings at schools and libraries and colleges. And when he does get a decent stretch of time in London something always comes along and claims it. There are the reviews, which pop up at irregular intervals, and from time to time he gets asked for an article on the contemporary scene or a retrospective overview of some dead poet’s work. Or someone will ask him for a contribution to a charitable publication for Amnesty or UNICEF, or to give an opinion on something or other for the BBC, or to judge a competition. And then there are the weekends with influential people in their country retreats, the publishers’ parties, and the launches of other people’s books; all of it necessary to keep his name and his face in the places where they need to be seen, but all of it drawn from the same pool of energy and time as his writing.
Turf Shed and Salamander are fine. They are good. Their sales figures must mean something. The sequence of love poems in Salamander is always being talked about because it celebrates the older woman in her passage through menopause. ‘Taj Mahal’ and one or two other poems from the series pop up regularly in round-ups and on Poetry Please on Radio 4, requested by the kind of person who wouldn’t have understood a word of his earlier work. His better work. His real work.
He reaches for his cigarettes, stops to light one, walks on through the damp night, mist and smoke mingling now in his exhaled breath. The rain has stopped but it is getting colder. He wishes he had picked up a hat on his way out of the house.
He dislikes the thought of being highbrow but he equally dislikes the idea that he is being read by suburban housewives behind net curtains who listen to bloody Poetry Please. He has not yet stooped to the level of being included on school curriculae, but his poems have been used for the unseen sections of secondary school exams, both in Ireland and the UK. Does he mean ‘stooped’ or does he mean ‘risen’? Suddenly he realises that he is fretting over inconsequential things. Good or bad, read or unread, his published poems are gone. They are making their own way in the world. And his worry about them is neurotic, and covering a far greater problem which he is unwilling to face. He is the masturbating man who has squandered his seed in pursuit of instant gratification, mindless of its real purpose. He is not writing. He has no energy left for it. And a person who does not write poetry has no right to call himself a poet.
It is not the first time he has had this thought. It was, for much of his life, at the heart of his philosophy. He may have even been heard to talk about it in public. Lines on a page are not poetry, no matter what kind of pretty shapes they make, unless there is a true poetic thought contained within them. Poems are not little stories or slices of life. They are not prayers or descriptive passages or songs that have lost their tunes. The job of a poet is to reveal an idea or an observation or an insight that can be described in no other way. It is to forge a bridge with words that can bypass the cumbersome and limited workings of the conscious mind and speak directly from writer to reader; from soul to soul. A poem that works takes the breath away; a poem that works creates a holy shiver which is the closest thing to spiritual rapture that most people will ever experience.
He sees it now, the reason that he is not writing; the weakness in Turf Shed and Salamander and the poems for Amnesty and UNICEF, and the ones he has written on commission to fill a blank space in an arty journal, and all the snatches and fragments, the once-and-twice drafted pieces piled up in his desk drawers. They are poor imitations. The craft is still there but the substance is not. These poems, even the best of them, are made from pine instead of oak; plastic instead of bronze. They look good at a glance, but there is no weight to them. He sees now that he has departed from his core beliefs and become what his younger self so much despised. He is a sham, a publicist’s creation, a poet in name only, a media tart.
At the gates to the park he pauses. Go back or go on? Not back, anyway, not yet. Not back to that. Is she to blame for all this? Has she spiked his bloody bite-sized goat’s cheese tartlets? Mickey-Finned his Amé?
But if she did, if she is the perpetrator, then he has been the willing victim. He is ambushed by a sudden wave of love for her, then recalls what she has done to herself. The stark memory diverts the wave but does not stem it. He finds that it is still there, underground, that same feeling that has surprised him again and again throughout the years he has known her. It is a kind of love he stopped believing in when his first teenage relationship bit the dust, and he does not believe in it now. But it is there, undeniably, and if it isn’t of his making, then whose? He looks into the heath. It has great swathes of darkness strewn across it. Right under London’s nose it is a secret place, alive with heroes and gods. He senses their proximity and sees that his confirmed rationality is as blind as his mother’s Catholic faith and just as much of an excuse for lazy thinking. It is an idiot’s trick to proclaim, as he often does, that there are more things on heaven and earth, and then to close his mind resolutely against them.
His heart rattles on, an erratic intro to some racy dance tune. He takes out his cigarettes again. He knows they will kill him but he wants just one more, for the level part of the path before it begins to climb. Because he has decided to go in. It is a foolhardy thing to do. The heath is dangerous at night. But it is the closest he can get tonight to home, and there is something waiting for him in there.
{17}
All of a sudden, No Sandwiches was trendy. It got rave write-ups in Time Out and two of the broadsheet weekend supplements ran features on it. Soon the place was packed to capacity from the time it opened in the morning until th
e time it closed. The ‘in’ crowd moved on to the next wonderful discovery, but their work had been done. In eighteen months the café had paid back its initial capital costs and was in the black. So she promoted her most reli- able staff member to the position of branch manager and diverted her energy into opening a second No Sandwiches in Bloomsbury. A year later she opened a third one in Ealing. Her original small suppliers could not meet the increased demand, so she took on additional ones rather than being tempted into the more profitable but ultimately less satisfactory option of approaching bigger commercial kitchens.
Branches four and five opened. People began to approach her looking for franchises. She declined, fearful of falling standards. Instead she upped the ante and began to introduce organic alternatives into the operation. This met with such success that by the time she opened branch six she had decided to make all her cafés completely organic. There was a six-month wobble as the customer base rearranged itself in adjustment to the inevitable price hike, but then it settled down and No Sandwiches forged ahead again.
Despite her change of profession, the parties and book launches and weekend invitations didn’t go away. She was still on the invitation lists of all her old contacts, and no one seemed to mind that she was no longer in the trade. Besides, he was on many of those lists as well, and he had not changed his trade. So she still mixed with the old set and kept up with who was in and who was out and who was up- and-coming. And time after time at these gatherings, people who knew of her connection to No Sandwiches asked her why she didn’t extend her operations and open a proper restaurant. There was always a need for new places, they said, where publishers and agents could take their authors or have small, intimate dinner parties in peace and quiet. Initially she ignored these enquiries. She had her hands full with the six branches and she had, for the first time in years, succeeded in getting a few evenings a month at home. She was learning to cook and enjoying it, all the more so since she had become so interested in organic and local food. He liked it, too, that she was at home more, and they ate meals together and talked and watched TV like ordinary people.
Tales from the Tower, Volume 2 Page 7