It was a lorry pulled into a passing place on the single-lane road. The driver had been wakened by the cold and started the engine to warm the cabin. He gave us a lift all the way to Aberdeen, and didn’t ask any questions, being more interested in his life than ours. The parliament in London, apparently, had just passed a law that would make separation for seven years grounds for a divorce. The question was, would it apply in Scotland, which had its own legal system? He and his wife had been parted for three years. ‘Only four to go,’ he explained more than once. He wouldn’t take any money and in the depot in Aberdeen found another lorry for us. That was how we got as far as Manchester. That driver took money from Eileen, and she had only enough left in her purse to pay for one room for a night in the cheapest boarding house we could find. In the room, she put down the small case from August’s bedroom. Once we’d found it, she’d shown no interest in the contents and I decided discussing what we should do could wait till morning.
A faint smell of stale smoke hung in the air. A cigarette stub sat in a tin ashtray on the night table by the bed. Apart from the bed, there was a single chair by the window, a wardrobe, a folding canvas stand to take a case, a hanging bulb with a brown shade, and in a corner a lamp which flickered and went out when we tried it. It was a double bed.
She began to take her clothes off and I pulled my shirt over my head. We hadn’t kissed or touched one another. We undressed standing on either side of the bed, and when I was stripped I stood and watched as she became naked. I saw the hair between her legs and the weight of her breasts, the way they were big and hung down a little. She knelt on the bed, and leaning on it with one hand reached and took hold of me. I felt her hand close round me and by some miracle I didn’t explode. She lay on her back and drew me on top of her. When I felt myself go in, I cried, ‘I’m in, oh, I’m in!’ and she tightened on me and then it happened. I tensed when I heard her laughing, and then I realised she was laughing not at me but with me, and what was between us was sealed and sealed for ever. And then she came over on top of me.
It was like passing out the way I went to sleep, but when I woke up she was still there. I eased my arm out from under her and got up and put out the light. Even when I’d done that, the room wasn’t really dark for there was a lamp in the corridor kept on all night, perhaps in case anyone sneaked off without paying, and light leaked in under the door.
From the bed, her voice whispered, ‘Would they have killed us?’
‘Oh, I think so,’ I said.
I got back in and she turned towards me and I put my hand between her legs and she opened up and that was the second time. The second time she started to move, suddenly heaving her body up, lifting me, grinding against me. She shook and groaned and even when she stopped I went on, back and forward, and she came again and this time I did, too. This time I didn’t go to sleep. I wasn’t sure whether she was awake. She didn’t say anything. I wanted to see her face, but it was tucked against my shoulder. I lay in the dark and listened to her breathing, and at some point I must have fallen asleep for she wasn’t beside me. I sat up in a panic, and an indrawn breath made me see her, in the chair near the window.
I got out of bed and pulled up the blinds. It was early. A little sun glowed like a cinder through a bolster of clouds bunched over the slate roofs of the buildings.
‘I’m all right,’ she said. ‘It isn’t cold.’
‘Why did you get up?’ And when she didn’t answer, ‘What are you thinking about?’
‘It isn’t interesting.’
‘Tell me.’
‘You asked me why I married. Do you remember? If I was so happy as a nurse, you said, so glad to be free of my father. I waited for you to ask me if it was because Bernard was rich.’ I made an inarticulate noise mixing protest and apology. ‘It’s true those last months on my own were the happiest of my life. The week before our wedding I went to Bernard’s house to tell him I didn’t want to go through with it. He said to me, “You don’t know what you want.” He didn’t raise his voice, but for the first time – wasn’t I a fool? – I understood how terrible it would be for him, in front of all his friends – he had so much pride. I can’t remember what I said. I was trying to say how sorry I was for him. I think it was my pity that made him rape me. At first I tried to stop him, but he went on. He went on until I didn’t want to stop him. At one point as I climaxed, I cried out, and he said, “Quietly! My father’s upstairs.” After that, I didn’t try to resist marrying any more. All night I didn’t want to stop him.’
Not finding words, I held her in the circle of my arms. Enfolding her, I made a bargain with myself that I would do everything I could to stop her going to the police. What justice could there be in anything that might separate us? One of the Morton brothers a murderer, the other a rapist: the world was better off without them. August and Beate were their own punishment. The police might not believe us. I had all the arguments. Yet even then, bending into the mingled scent of our lovemaking to kiss her, I knew that every bargain has its price.
In a dry tone almost of disbelief she whispered, ‘And now he’s dead. What are we going to do?’
‘Live,’ I said.
When we went out in the morning, I didn’t check the number or the name of the street, for it was just a cheap boarding house lost in an anonymous wilderness of red brick in one or another suburb of the city we stopped in for a night on our way to London.
EPILOGUE
Beginnings
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
The cardiologist didn’t ask about Eileen, so I’d no chance to tell him we’d lived together for over fifty years and that she was dead and what was wrong with my heart was that it was broken. That would have embarrassed both of us. My GP had offered the consolation that she was very old, and I hadn’t told him how little that mattered. If she had been a hundred, something in me would have cried out in anger against her death.
It wasn’t true that we never quarrelled, yet I think of our worst quarrel as happiness, since I was with her. Apart from our first time together, Eileen used a diaphragm – a Dutch cap, they called it then – when we made love. Maybe she felt I was too young for the responsibility of children; maybe, at first, she imagined I might leave if she were pregnant. Afterwards, when she stopped, I used condoms until one day she asked me why. I told her that the doctor said it would be dangerous if she had a baby. ‘At my age?’ she wondered bitterly. That’s how it was at that time. In later years I couldn’t bear to hear of those mothers of forty or more, even mothers of fifty! And when she told me, “I’d risk dying for your child,” it was too late – it never happened.
I’d been nodding wherever it seemed appropriate as the cardiologist talked, but now I realised he’d fallen silent and was looking at me. ‘You’re taking this very calmly,’ he said. ‘Are you sure you understand what I’m saying?’
My mother was dead. My father had died long ago. My wife was dead. I had met her in the middle of the last century. It was just before the British had herded the Kikuyu together, when men’s mouths were filled with mud and some were beaten to death in a camp called Hola. Were preparations undertaken that year, contracts made, bribes taken? What did it matter? After the Nazi death camps, all of us knew that Europe of the high culture was a continent of torturers. That was the dirty secret of the dull Fifties and all the decades that followed. What did it matter? The sickness was in the air and it travelled to all the continents of the world so that it seemed colour and creed no longer mattered since they were only excuses for what united men, their need to hurt one another. What did it matter? After beating away unnoticed all my life, my heart had turned traitor. In the republic of the body, it had grown restless. It was a presence now, a dull space, a hollowness or a tremor that left me feeling squeamish.
It seemed that I had come to a destination out of the corner of my eye as it were, for when I got up at three in the morning, after lying awake for hours, I found not one but three unopened containers of opiates in the medic
ine cabinet. I shaved, avoiding my eyes in the mirror, dressed more carefully than usual, and took the pills down to the kitchen.
I had them piled high in front of a bottle of whisky and the first glass poured when I thought that someone would have to find me. I shrank from the idea of a neighbour alarmed by a smell; a workman coming on me by accident. I would write a letter to the police, I decided, and go out now and post it. Deep in thought, the chime of the doorbell startled me to my feet. I peered cautiously through the glass of the front door, and made out a shape darker than the night behind it. For an instant I believed it was the police, and was as bewildered as if I were already dead.
I was astonished to find my neighbour on the step. He had been with one of the banks, working on acquisitions, but had already retired when we took the house next to them. He was fully dressed, with his coat on, and carrying a plastic shopping bag.
‘Walter?’ I asked, as if testing an improbability.
‘I saw your kitchen light was on. Can I come in?’
I stepped aside but then, as he headed down the corridor, remembered the pills and whisky and directed him into the front room. Unlike the kitchen, the front of the house faced north and the leather of the armchair felt cold as we settled on either side of the empty hearth.
We were neighbours, not friends. We chatted across the garden fence in summer. ‘I flew all over Europe on business. Enjoyed every minute of it. I won’t tell you I don’t miss it. I feel I could still do it, but nowadays it’s all about what age you are. And it wasn’t all business. What people don’t know doesn’t hurt them, and I wouldn’t have hurt Jean for the world, but when you’re far from home, eh? You know what they say: on your deathbed, it’s not the women you’ve slept with you’ll regret, it’s the ones you haven’t!’ How many times I’d heard Walter on that refrain, like a continuous loop. It alternated with an interest in maps and military campaigns, fuelled, it seemed, by nostalgia for national service. When I told him I’d missed out on those delights because of flat feet, I’d gone down in his estimation.
That was Walter, thick glasses, round belly, white hair, soldier and Casanova. Eileen had liked Jean, who had welcomed us when we moved in and died the following year of cancer of the stomach. That was something we had now in common, being widowers, but this was only the second time Walter had been in my front room.
His previous visit had been a strange one, too. ‘I don’t know if you’ll even feel like voting. Your wife not long taken from you, but life goes on, I found that.’ I’d had a strong temptation to take him by the neck and throw him over the doorstep, but had brought him in here instead; welcoming him as a voice to break the silence. ‘I’ve never done this before, Harry, going round the doors like this. It’s a new party – just a small one, but it’ll grow, I shouldn’t be surprised, and I think you’re exactly the kind of man it’ll appeal to.’ As he rhymed off policies on education, health and fishing, it made a kind of sense, though all slightly askew, like politics conducted through the looking glass. ‘And then there’s the constitution. What we’re going to do is get rid of the MEPs and reduce the number of MPs from seventy-two to fifty-six. And they’ll do both jobs, Holyrood and Westminster. That way, you see, we’ll be able to get rid of the new parliament building and all the MSPs as well, and there’ll be no problem about reserved powers.’ At that point, I’d started to laugh; but he, it seemed, was perfectly serious and he’d left a leaflet as proof.
Now, settling down opposite me, he declared, ‘It’s like a sign, finding you up at this hour and still dressed.’
‘I was reading.’
‘I do that, fall asleep over the book. You’re tired but you can’t face going to bed.’
We looked at each other in silence.
‘Thing is,’ Walter said eventually, ‘I’ve got a sister lives in Castlemilk. Respectable woman, but life hasn’t been easy for her. The scheme’s gone down since she first got a council house there.’
‘Yes?’ Just the one cautious word. It was possible the man was a secret drinker.
‘I visited her a month ago, and when I came out someone had scratched the Jaguar. A key or some bloody thing right along the side of it. That car’s my pride and joy.’
‘I’ve seen you polishing it.’
‘You don’t need me to tell you that kind of thing happens. But here, a fortnight ago, same thing again.’
‘That’s bad.’
‘It’s atrocious.’ He lowered his voice. ‘But I found out who did it, through a man who knows a man who knows a policeman. The family’s notorious, they’re telling me. Now, Harry, this is it. I’m not the kind of man to let a thing like that pass. But, and I’ll admit it, I’d appreciate a wee bit of back-up. And, eh, I don’t want to go in the Jaguar. Your car would maybe fit in better round that district. I mean, it wouldn’t be recognised.’
He had been carrying two rectangular boxes in the carrier bag. When I looked over my shoulder as we drove through the scheme, I saw them lying side by side, where Walter had taken them out of the bag and laid them carefully on the back seat. I noted uneasily that the streets weren’t entirely deserted. At this hour I had expected them to be, but we passed not one but three separate walkers, each hurrying on, head down, as if taking part in a foot race.
‘Best to stop here,’ Walter said. ‘The house we want is round the corner.’
He got out and stood with his head back, searching perhaps to see if there might be a moon hidden behind the clouds. From the back seat he lifted out the two boxes, and I took one from him as I clambered out.
‘Hope I can manage this,’ Walter said. ‘The bones at the bottom of my back are just a crumble, but I swim every day to keep the musculature. We’re not allowed to dive from the side, so I dive from the steps. And just as I do, my body remembers what it is to be young. I look forward to that moment every day.’
We walked round the corner and Walter straightened his shoulders, cleared his throat and, reaching into the box, threw the first egg, chucking it overarm like a soldier lobbing a grenade. Another four followed in rapid succession, before I came awake and launched my first missile.
I didn’t really believe any of it was happening until my egg exploded against the wall, leaving yet another dribbling mess on the white harling. There were a dozen eggs in each box and I was down to my last one when a light came on in an upstairs window. I started at a run after Walter, who had taken off like a startled rabbit.
In the car, as one street whirled into another, I crouched over the wheel and marvelled at the steady beating of my heart.
‘Urban guerrillas!’ Walter shouted, grinning and nodding. ‘Just for one night!’
From then on, we alternated silence with sudden fits of triumphant guilty laughter. By the time we got back, the guilt had a slight edge and, wary of getting involved in a postmortem, I refused his offer to come in for a whisky.
‘Sleep well, then,’ Walter said. ‘I’ll have one on my own, or maybe two.’
‘Another time.’
‘But you enjoyed it?’
‘It was different.’ I saw him smile at the word. Suddenly more light-hearted, I added, ‘That’s worth something when you get to our age!’
He pulled a card from an inside pocket, and passed it across. ‘My son in Washington sent me that.’
It was a folded letter-card with a picture on the front. Angling it to catch the light from the streetlamp, I saw that it showed three old men. One was gesturing with two fists, one was stepping back in a trance of admiration, the one in the middle was leaning forward to join in whatever was going on. And there were two spectators, younger men, not part of the group but watching humorously. The caption read: ‘ “Growing old: it’s not nice, but it’s interesting.” August Strindberg (1849–1912).’
‘Unusual name,’ I said, handing it back. ‘I used to know someone called August.’
Home again, I shovelled the tablets into the glass of whisky, put the whole concoction into the pan of the small downstair
s lavatory, and flushed it away. I looked at myself in the round mirror above the basin and wondered what Eileen would have said if she’d been watching. I offered her an explanation: Since the heart attack I’m warned off spirits; and imagined her smiling at the joke.
In defiance of doctors, back in my own familiar chair I cradled a fresh glass of whisky. As I sipped, I felt my heart beating. If it had been the last night turning into day of my life, it would have been one free of pain and full of interest. That might not be everything but it was a great deal; and in the end perhaps something a creature of chance and time should settle for.
I drained the whisky and went to bed but, habit being hard to break, got up and started my round of switching off lamps and checking the locks on every door and window. In the kitchen, the earliest flush of morning light drew me out to walk round the garden, feeling the dew strike up through my slippers. A small breeze was clearing the last traces of mist and the air felt newly washed.
The next thing I knew I was walking along a street, having just come from my house. Across the road I saw a man getting out of a car and opening the boot. I had started to walk on when he called to me and I saw it was my friend Tony. He was pushing a pram and he looked very well and smiling though he’s young to have a family. ‘I didn’t realise it was you,’ I said. ‘I was expecting you further along.’ As we turned back to the house, I was struck by how beautiful the child in the pram was. I can hardly talk to Tony for the wonder of her. Her eyes are incredibly blue and she is laughing. I can hardly wait to hold her in my arms. Tony asks about getting the pram in – we’ll have to go up steps to the front door, I say, and since the kitchen is at the back we’ll have to carry the pram through the front room. As I work this out, I become embarrassed and begin to apologise. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I can’t stop, over and over again, I’m sorry, until I force myself to wake up.
My Life as a Man Page 20