‘All be dead by the morning,’ the flower man points out as Jenny signs an enormous cheque.
‘That’s exactly what I want,’ Jenny says exuberantly, and the man looks at me with pity.
Of course I see the inevitable withering of each blossom, just as I see old age and death whenever I look into the unfocused eyes of a baby. But now I can accept the cruel laws of nature. We are not touched by them, my love and I; together we have created a timeless paradise.
I pull Jenny into the bedroom, where we make passionate love – or, at least, I do. She is silent, passive. Later, in our bathroom, I see myself in the full-length mirror. My shout of triumph echoes through the house and brings Jenny, running, half dressed.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Look! It’s complete. I look just like anyone else, don’t I?’
‘But you always did.’
‘For centuries I had no reflection or shadow at all. When I met you I developed a shadow and when I looked in the mirror there was just a glimmer, a hint of light. Didn’t you notice?’
‘Nope.’
‘Too busy looking at your own reflection. I always had to avoid mirrors and cameras, I had to fake those photographs on my documents during the war. It made shaving very dangerous, that’s why I go to the barber’s. But now …’
‘What difference does it make?’
I don’t reply but continue to stare at myself in the mirror rapturously, reaching out to touch my reflected hair, eyes and nose. Jenny murmurs, ‘“Here I saw a mirror in which I observed the world, life and my own soul in fearful grandeur.”’
‘Schopenhauer? I sometimes forget, you can read now. You’ve come a long way, Jenny.’
‘Don’t you patronize me.’
‘Sorry. But you are, after all, my invention, my delusion. Quite the nicest delusion I’ve ever had.’
‘What if you’re a figment of my imagination?’
‘Why, this is quite like old times. A few centuries ago this kind of metaphysical hair-splitting was all the rage. If I didn’t exist I would have to be invented, to make people feel good about themselves. And I had to invent you, my sweet Jenny, because I was bored and lonely and drunk one night and touched by your terror of getting old. Let’s just say that, having invented each other, we fell in love.’
‘Love? You?’
‘You’re not as hard as you pretend. And neither am I.’
‘Don’t go soggy on me, Leo. And don’t make long speeches tonight, I can’t stand it.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s so pompous and – un-English.’
‘But I’m not English. I’m a citizen of the world, seduced by you into staying on this dreary island.’
Our first guests arrive. I feel so benevolent that I have to restrain myself from showering them with jewels and making fountains of champagne play in every room. Cheap tricks. Jenny wouldn’t like it. She was furious when paragraphs appeared in various gossip columns about bizarre gastronomic magical rites at a rock star’s Chelsea house.
I’m determined to enjoy my party. With each person here I have a special relationship, a secret they’ve confided in me. While Katrina confesses that she has started taking speed again, Charles tells me in my other ear that he’s accepted a ‘retainer’ from a famous gangster whose trial begins on Wednesday. As I fill Leonie’s glass she heaves with unrequited love and I’m flattered, although I have no intention of requiting it. Out of the corner of my eye I see Toby chatting up Melissa, the wild fourteen-year-old daughter of Martin, an impoverished painter who is grovelling to Lucinda because she runs a fashionable Cork Street gallery. Most of the people here are one-lifers; it does seem a shame that they have to waste so much effort and passion on their brief cameo appearances.
Those of us who have the security of a contract behind us behave with less desperation. Pete, who staged his own suicide recently, has just reinvented himself as Marcus, a gay poet living in Morocco. He asks me to recommend an obscure dead poet he can plagiarize from. We’re so good at finding new masks, we have the time and money to sink ourselves gracefully into each new identity. I feel comfortable and elegant in my creamy linen suit, and Jenny looks radiant in her long green dress. She has cut her thick black hair to shoulder length and frizzed it so that she looks like a cross between a poodle and a Pharaoh. She looks delightful, and our friends delight me, too, as they chatter and glitter. I open my arms to invite them all to eat.
Many of these people were also at Toby and Katrina’s party last week. That evening has already been mythologized, and there’s a stir of disappointment when solid food is served at a solid table. At the end of the meal I stand up and feel the anticipation of marvel as our seated guests turn towards me. Jenny is sitting at the other end of the long table, opposite me but too far away for me to be able to see her eyes.
‘My friends, I want to thank you all for coming along tonight. This is the best birthday I’ve ever had, and I’m older than I look. I also want you to celebrate a wonderful moment with us. As you all know, I’ve moved around a lot, and I don’t suppose I’m easy to live with, but Jenny has put up with me for years.’ A sigh of gushing approval passes around the table and several of the women look enviously at Jenny. ‘I’ve been thinking for a long time that I ought to settle down and you, my dear friends, have made me feel that this is the right time and place. Your warmth and support mean so much to me. After what feels like an eternity I’ve come to realize that only one woman has everything I want and need. Jenny is the woman of my heart, and I’ve invited you tonight to tell you that we’re going to be married. In a few months I hope to see you all again at our wedding – just a quiet little civil ceremony; we’re not conventionally religious. To Jenny!’
We all stand up and toast her, smiling, approving, accepting. I walk down the side of the long table, past our seated friends, towards her, my arms outstretched. This is the moment I have planned all week, the public embrace that will seal our betrothal. She is looking down at her lap, shyly I think. Then, when I’m six feet away, she looks up and I see hatred in her dark eyes. The room vanishes, the people fade and there are only the two of us in the universe. I’m alone with the woman I love, and she detests me.
The party goes on around us for a few more hours, and we don’t say a word to each other. Friends circle with congratulations and thanks, I chat and smile and kiss and pour out more drinks. Jenny won’t look at me. When the last drunken guest leaves at five it’s already light. The summer dawn glows over the wreckage of the party, the exhausted flowers and Jenny’s pale face as I shut the front door and go over to the couch where she sits. I kneel in front of her and put my head in her lap. ‘Don’t you want to marry me?’
‘You didn’t even ask. You just announced it in front of all those people. How could you?’
‘I thought you’d be pleased. I thought it was what women want.’
‘You’re in the wrong century, Leo. I’ve never wanted to marry anybody.’
‘Of course, it’s true, marriage is but a ceremonial toy. You’re right, Jenny, I probably am in the wrong century. I can feel your heart beating. My skin knows your skin and my flesh aches for yours. I dream about making love with you even when we’re sleeping in the same bed. When we’re apart and I’m walking in a strange city I expect to meet you on every street. Your face looks out at me from every piece of music I hear, every book I read, every woman I meet. Isn’t that what you call love?’
‘It does sound rather like it, but –’
‘Ha!’ I raise my head and stare at her, the instrument of my victory. ‘I’ve done it – or rather you’ve done it to me, I don’t understand how. So, of course, we have to marry. It’s what people do.’
‘But we can’t! It would be terribly dishonest, a sort of blasphemy.’
‘It’s a bit late to worry about blasphemy. We’re already bound together by contract.’
‘I know, you never stop telling me. Isn’t that enough? I don’t want to pretend any more.
I’m tired. I can’t go through with some farcical ceremony.’
‘You’re tired! You’ve only been at it for sixty years. How do you think I feel? You have no idea how tedious it is to have to keep inventing new sins, new tricks and seductions and crimes and temptations and scams and torments. If life’s a bitch, eternity’s a cruel, vicious harpy. I don’t want to be the villain any more. I want to retire. I’ve had enough. I’m no worse than most of the people I see around me. I admit my past is shady, but whose isn’t? I really have changed, I just want to live here peacefully with you, to be kind to you and enjoy life. Why aren’t you pleased, Jenny? Stop looking at me like that, as if I disgusted you.’
‘I can’t help it. It’s as if Hitler were to turn round and say he wanted to be a nursery-school teacher.’
‘He did, you know, quite frequently, when he was alone with Eva Braun. He loved children. And animals.’
‘Well, you should know. And because you have knowledge like that you can never be an ordinary man. I can’t think why you want to be anyway. Most people’s lives are very dull.’
‘But that’s what I want!’
‘But why now? Why me?’
‘I don’t really know why you. Compared with Helen of Troy or Cleopatra or the Empress Josephine or any of my other old girlfriends you are, it’s true, very ordinary.’
‘Thanks a bunch.’
‘Perhaps it’s your very simplicity that appeals to me. Anyway, you must believe me when I say I want to retire. I’m more or less redundant anyway. Nobody needs me or believes in me any more. The Metaphysical Bank will carry on perfectly well without me and the City and Wall Street and wars and famines and pestilence. You people are well on the way to wiping yourselves out and have no need of my guidance. Quite honestly, I’ve run out of ideas. Once you’ve seen one war or epidemic you’ve seen them all. The whole cycle of tragedy is very repetitive. Yes, Jenny, I want to take early retirement, with you, my darling.’ I try to kiss her, but she edges away.
‘But what are you going to do with yourself for the next few thousand years?’
‘I want to be stupendously dull, to turn no heads as I walk down the street, to be an uxorious husband. I might even get a job in an ordinary bank. Stop laughing at me! I mean it.’
‘Then you must find another woman to live that life with. I know too much about you. You can’t expect me to believe all this.’
‘You don’t have to believe it. Just marry me and humour me and take what I’m offering.’
‘I can’t, Leo.’
David
I feel ugly and clumsy. I push you away, and our eyes meet in a gaze of terrible intensity as they did that day in Green Park. We stare at each other for a long time. Some instinct warns me that if I don’t oppose you now you’ll destroy me. I feel my will shut down like an icy portcullis. The effort of resisting you is so exhausting that I fall asleep where I’m sitting, on the couch.
When I wake up I’m still here, covered with a rug, and you’ve disappeared. Now that you’ve offered to make me the centre of you life and I’ve refused I suppose we can only turn away from each other. Our dance never stops, I can never rest or hold on to your feelings or my own. As soon as I define what you mean to me the moment passes, you’ve changed and my arms are empty again. I’m so weary.
You’re trying to use me to tell yourself the most outrageous lie of all: that you’re a good, simple, loving man, that our contract could be the foundation of a solid bourgeois marriage. As if I’ve ever wanted such a thing, as if I’ve travelled all this way just to be stupefied by the smugness of coupledom.
Alone in this enormous house I wander from room to room, touching the objects you have brought back from your travels: Aboriginal art, African carvings, Gothic sculptures, Roman torsos. Seventy years ago you collected me. Leave you? I love this house, our way of life, and as for you – I don’t want to think about you just now. I’m glad you’ve gone away.
I’m reading Jung, who speaks to me with terrifying directness. I am trapped in what he would call the psychic underworld, and, indeed, I am disorientated and dissociated as I sit here alone in my study. My thoughts stray to David as I look out of the window at the park where we so often used to walk together. He must be thirty-eight now, married to Muriel, with small children and a successful legal career; all predictable – except that I know there’s a tiny corner of David that isn’t predictable at all, and that corner belongs to me.
On the phone he sounds just like George. ‘Oh it’s you. I suppose you’ve been arrested.’
‘No. I just want to talk to you.’
‘Are you in trouble?’
‘No, I’m fine. The wicked flourish, you know. I’d love to see you. Are you allowed out?’
‘As it happens, Muriel and the children have gone to stay with her mother in Bournemouth.’
‘Perfect. Would you like to come here and have dinner with me tomorrow night?’
When I first see David again I find him coarsened, red and hot in his dark suit. We don’t kiss but stare at each other on my doorstep. After I hand him a drink he strides from room to room, staring at everything in silence. ‘Where’s the husband who pays for all this?’
‘Leo? He’s in New York. I think. Or Tokyo. We’ve been living together for fourteen years now, but we’re not married. You are, aren’t you? Leo always said you’d marry Muriel; she was so determined to get you. Let’s go and sit in the garden.’
He follows me downstairs and sits on the other side of the marble-topped table in morose silence. For a while there’s nothing to say. I wonder if the public man has driven out the private; if David, like so many men I know, has a career now instead of an inner life. It’s a change that holds families together but destroys intimacy.
Suddenly he stretches, laughs, yawns, all in one expansive gesture. I smile in response and take his hand across the table as he says, ‘You look ridiculously unchanged. Absurdly young. So you found your millionaire. What does he do?’
‘I’m not really sure. Buys and sells things.’
‘Drugs, probably, like your last paramour. Did you invite me over just to flaunt this bloody great house?’
‘I wanted to see you here. I’ve missed you, David. Now you’ve been here I’ll have new memories of you, sitting here in this garden and standing on my doorstep and marching around upstairs touching all my things. The house won’t seem so cold and empty.’
‘It’s a bit late to convince me you’re sentimental, Jenny. I haven’t forgotten how you seduced me and then dumped me when it suited you. You’re utterly cynical.’
‘Maybe I’m cynical and sentimental. And maybe you wanted to be seduced.’
‘Of course I did, stupid,’ he mutters angrily.
All around us the baked earth, mossy lawn and dusty flower beds gasp in the last of the evening sun. The sprinkler system turns itself on and releases intoxicating smells of grass, roses and lavender as well as our own salty flesh. As we eat our supper of cold soup, pasta, salad and melon we lean towards each other across the table, and by the time it’s dark we’re wound together on the same chair. David stops protesting that he has to go home.
Later, in bed, I say, ‘It’s done me so much good to see you again. I knew I could trust you.’
‘Oh, is that what you think of me? The gullible idiot who always comes back.’
‘David, don’t …’
‘I’ve been reading about the grandes horizontales in nineteenth-century Paris. Nana, that’s you, isn’t it, Jenny? Oozing sex, men ruining themselves for her …’
‘And what about the men? Why did they chase her and not the matrons? Why was it Nana’s fault?’
‘They liked her because she was more fun.’
‘Nana died young, didn’t she? I’ve no intention of doing that.’
‘Neither had she.’
‘This is a ridiculous conversation. You’re pretending to talk about a book, and all the time you’re really reproaching me because I’m not more of a hy
pocrite. If I’d been all coy and refused to go to bed with you you’d adore me. I bet Muriel was like that.’
‘Are you jealous of her?’
‘Would you like me to be?’
‘Yes. I want to make you so jealous you scream and shout.’
‘And then you’ll say I’m neurotic and hysterical and you’ll leave me. I’ll tell you something, David, as a friend, not just a lover. There is a war between men and women. It starts at birth and only finishes when you die. You practise skirmishes on your father, if you’re a girl, and on your brothers if you have any. Then, when you’re what is called grown-up, you strap on your armour, go out into the hard, nasty world and look for someone to take it off again. When you’re stark naked, totally vulnerable and dependent, you announce you’re in love.’
‘Sounds like me with you.’
‘Sounds like all of us, at one time or another. Some people choose to fight their own sex, of course, and some people are conscientious objectors. Marriage is a truce, but it doesn’t last long.’
‘My grandparents had a happy marriage. So have I until now.’
In the morning David leaves for work. I stand at the door and watch him walk to his car, open it and sit at the wheel, utterly in control. Hard to believe this is the same man who laughed and writhed and gasped and sobbed a few hours ago. I wonder if he will come back to me tonight. He does.
Every night in the cool, dark bedroom David and I make love, talk, laugh, massage and bathe each other. My golden boy looks older now, older than Leo, but I still adore his body. I’m tempted to confide in him. But if he knew his illicit passion is for an 86-year-old woman I’d never see him again. More probably, he wouldn’t believe my story. He has no imagination. Yet I do feel very close to him. Of course, he thinks we’re contemporaries in that generation I joined when I started taking the pill – which reminds me, I stopped taking it a few months ago. Rummaging in my dressing-table drawer just now I found a pack and took three. I think they work retrospectively.
Loving Mephistopeles Page 17