Glover's Mistake

by Nick Laird

  ‘Actually, as it happens, she’s started seeing James.’

  His mother wilted. She drew her hands in off the table and set them in her lap, and looked much smaller suddenly, and old.

  ‘Oh? I didn’t realize that James and…I didn’t know.’

  David was willing her to pretend that it was fine, that she wasn’t upset, but she couldn’t, or anyway didn’t. Her face congealed into its pained expression, the very particular grimace that appeared when she watched the news or surveyed her neighbours’ gardens from the back bedroom—his room when he stayed. Her weak chin elided into her neck, her eyes seemed to retract: every part of her tried to get as far away as possible from this repellent earth. David returned to looking at a wedding spread in the magazine and focused on the pictures. This happy couple’s taste was refined as far as a three-year-old’s fairy tale. Everything on their special day was gold and pink and white. David wanted his mother to get up and cross the room, to go back to the kitchen, but she started talking again, slowly now, in her dumb, tender voice.

  ‘It’s just we thought, when you talked about her on the phone…’

  He took up the biro again and started scribbling a moustache onto the bride, scoring bristles across her pointy little chin, her piscine pout. The pen broke through the page and ripped it. He knew Hilda was watching him with awkward, misplaced compassion and he said sternly, ‘There’s really nothing to talk about…It’s great. They’re really happy together. I’m really happy for them.’

  The grimace came again.

  ‘All right, darling, all right. Shall I make some tea? I’ll make some tea.’

  Jeroboam or something

  David spent nearly all of the week after Christmas online. Singleton, it turned out, was nicely sarcastic, with good taste in movies and books, and she was also, like David himself, a truth-teller. She could see past the hype. Things between them were still in the abstract. They hadn’t broached the topic of meeting yet, and neither had offered any real facts about themselves. They knew each other only by the soft individuating detail of their lives, their preferences and references and wit. He found himself thinking a lot about what she might look like. She had mentioned her ‘untameable hair’ but would only send a photo if he sent one first, and so far he hadn’t. She had even begun to sign off with an X, sometimes two.

  Glover’s mobile curtly buzzed while Zulu was on telly after lunch on Wednesday, and the flatmates were in the middle of a game of Scrabble. He looked up from its screen to announce that Ruth was hosting a New Year’s Eve dinner, and David was invited. The way he said it was particularly annoying, as if his own presence was a given, whereas David’s was a gift. Instead of smiling, David simply nodded, not raising his stare from his rack of tiles.

  ‘Yeah maybe, I’ll need to speak to some people.’

  His relationship with New Year’s Eve parties was deeply unhealthy. They abused him, humiliated him, and he came back begging for more. He would spend the evening leaning in some stranger’s kitchen doorway, getting snubbed and drunk, then queue for hours to use the single toilet, which would normally be blocked. The other thing was worse. He did it once. New Year’s Eve alone.

  David spent the tail end of the week reading Fowler’s The King’s English, having been asked a question in the week before Christmas about tenses, and having been stumped. He’d been standing at the whiteboard listing subordinate clauses in a monologue of Browning’s when Clare, the Home Counties Queen, raised her hand and asked whether a certain phrase was in the pluperfect. David was flustered and avoided answering directly—saying, ‘Well, what do you think?’—and she made a snotty little comeback about not being paid to know. At her intervention the entire class perked up, witnessed David’s blushing, then lowered their embarrassed gazes, along with their expectations.

  On Friday, New Year’s Eve, he faced the horror of his wardrobe. Firstly, he ruled out what he wore for school—cords and chinos, the round-neck jumpers—and examined the rest. If what one wears says who one is, David decided he was either a lumberjack (three plaid shirts) or a slovenly undertaker (one black suit with a crusty stain on the sleeve). He stood in front of his wardrobe mirror in a pair of checked boxer shorts, and then in the bathroom stepped tentatively onto the scales. The needle swung and vacillated with his heart. Fourteen stone seven pounds. He used to weigh—when he started at Goldsmiths—twelve stone three. According to his mother, he once came in at seven pounds and six ounces of blessing and trouble.

  Women tottered on and off the carriage, clutching each other and laughing, while the men grinned and cracked gags and clinked bags of drink. There was a determination to have fun, and even David succumbed to the microclimate, detecting a bounce in his step as he walked from the station to Ruth’s tower, arriving at eight exactly. In his satchel the dark wet weight of chilled champagne and a shrink-wrapped box of chocolates waited, and as he stood in the foyer, watching the illuminated countdown of the lift descending to him, he came to a decision: tonight he would have fun.

  Glover opened the door of the flat in a new caramel slim-fit shirt and a thin striped coffee-and-cream tie. His hair had been feathered or distressed or something. He looked as if he was the tough one in a boy band, and David told him so.

  ‘Happy New Year to you too.’

  In the white glare of the galley kitchen Ruth rushed towards David, her hair freshly dyed and cropped in New York, her eyes panda-ringed by eyeliner. She appeared to be wearing a kind of purple vestal robe. Everyone looked shiny and new, David thought, except him. As he was kissing Ruth hello, Larry appeared behind her.

  ‘We’re celebrating. Aside from this tiresome business of New Year’s Eve, we just heard yesterday that the Tate are taking two pieces of Ruth’s for their permanent collection.’

  ‘The only reason Larry’s celebrating is because he thinks he’s going to make some money.’

  The gallery owner mugged and winked at David, and David grinned obediently. He felt an irrational hatred for Larry’s white collarless shirt, for the way his navy slacks were precisely tailored to hang with a single crease above the tips of his glossy brown brogues.

  ‘Have some bubbles. Larry showed up with a nebuchadnezzar or a jeroboam or something.’

  Ruth handed him a filled champagne flute, and then kissed him unexpectedly again on the cheek. David took out the chocolates and his ordinary-sized bottle of champagne and set them on the counter, beside Larry’s goliath of glass. Ruth skimmed a glance at his offerings.

  ‘Oh lovely, thank you. Let’s go through to the living room. You have to meet Walter and Jess.’

  The small chandelier of wrought-iron foliage had been dimmed, and the three light bulbs glowed like Bartlett pears, ready to be plucked. Neatly, sweetly, without emotion, Ella Fitzgerald tinkled in the background. David had once written a Damp review of tame, smug Ella, the most overrated singer of the last, failed century. Glover knelt by the stereo in the corner, talking to a thickset sixty-something man in a tailored navy suit. Ruth introduced David to Jess, a slender woman who didn’t get off the sofa, though her eyes moved quickly up and down him. He felt processed, scanned, appraised. Her handshake was sharp, serrated with chunky rings.

  ‘Jess is here for a shoot. She’s working tomorrow, on New Year’s Day. Isn’t that crazy? And so unfair on Ginny.’

  David shook his head at this new outrage.

  ‘Are you a photographer?’

  ‘Sometimes, but tomorrow I’m styling for a friend.’ She had a slight, nasally voice, with a southern elasticity in the accent. David lowered himself down beside her. There was a pause. Jess was the first official lesbian he had ever met. He eyed her again, and smiled, and drank.

  ‘You’re kind of difficult to spot in all that black.’

  David looked down at his shirt and jumper and jacket, as if he hadn’t noticed what he was wearing, then gave Jess a very serious stare. ‘I wear black on the outside because black is how I feel on the inside.’

  She laughed—Da
vid was quoting but she didn’t know—and tucked a strand of her grey bob girlishly behind one ear, to keep free her brown, suspicious eyes. David intuited immediately that here, finally, was an ally.

  Ruth came back and handed Walter a glass, saying, ‘It’s such a shame you can’t stay for dinner. Especially after I coerced Larry into making risotto.’

  Walter gave a snickering laugh. ‘I do love to see Larry coerced. No, my driver’s waiting. He’s listening to his Learn Italian tapes.’ Then, as an afterthought, he barked, ‘His new girlfriend’s Milanese-a!’

  The accent was odd, unplaceable, and there was something imperial, anticipatory about the way he sat there. He was waiting to be entertained.

  Jess rose from the sofa and swished out after Glover and Ruth, and David saw that she was tall and small-breasted and elegant. Her cream camisole was embroidered with tiny black beads, as though an insect swarm had landed on her. At her neck she’d tied a thin, creased pale-coloured scarf: she could have been sitting beneath a ceiling fan on a veranda overlooking the Nile, awaiting her husband’s return from the dig. David was alone with the collector. Walter raised his glass in acknowledgement and David matched the movement, grinning, then hauled himself up and pulled a dining chair over. This was what a man who owned a bank looked like: bald and solid and self-contained, with an old rugby player’s leathery face.

  ‘Have you travelled far?’

  ‘Not very. Borough. Just south of the river. I came up on the tube.’

  ‘You’re a Londoner?’

  ‘I was at Goldsmiths actually, and Ruth taught me, that’s how I know her…We’re working together on a project, or talking about—’

  ‘A project…’ Walter tilted his head back slowly, pouring the thought into his brain. Larry was laughing again; there was a hiss from the kitchen and a sudden smell of seafood.

  David said, patiently, ‘Yes, an art project…’

  ‘And what do you hope to project?’

  Before David could reply, he placed a hand on his thigh and squeezed, hard, saying, ‘Sorry—bathroom?’

  David nodded in its direction.

  Jess appeared with a silver clutch bag tucked under her arm. ‘Do you smoke? I think I’ll need my coat out there…Did you remember to bring something warm with you?’

  Wrapped in their layers, they smoked on the balcony, twenty-three floors above London. Jess snapped her silver Zippo ablaze in a gesture deft as any pool-room hustler’s and proffered the flame to him. Her wedding ring was bulky and silver and square.

  Although he was aware it was ridiculous, David had still half-expected Jess to be fierce and angry and dressed like Annie Hall. Instead she had a kind of glamorous exhaustion; had the half-closed, heavy eyelids of a Garbo or a Dietrich, though her skin was not as soft as it had been. She suggested by a slightly brusque and self-neglectful manner that she’d come through the nuisance of her looks, and was glad to have left that all behind her. As David leaned in with his fag, she said, ‘So you’re James’s room-mate? That’s quite a romance going on there.’

  ‘Actually Ruth was my tutor at Goldsmiths—I was just telling Walter—and we’re working on a project about text in urban settings—graffiti, witness appeals, found notes, that kind of thing…’

  ‘Ruth’s working on a lot of projects…’

  Tenderly, so it seemed to David, Jess slipped her arm through his and steered him the few feet over to the puckered concrete of the balcony wall. They were not scared of physical contact, these people. Before them London was a sunken, bioluminescent world. A black taxi glided far below on Moorgate, shark-like, feeding. The roundabout at Old Street eddied. Headlights shoaled along the Embankment and across Blackfriars Bridge. Jess closed her purse with an immaculate click, and said, ‘Very young, isn’t he? I mean, I know muses are, generally…’

  David took a long pull on his cigarette.

  ‘A muse—really?’

  ‘Sure…I used to sit for Ruth, you know. A long time ago. It’s part of the deal.’

  David felt his stubby little heart rouse itself at the thought of these two women, lovers. He betrayed nothing in his manner, but the fact remained—the idea was hopelessly exotic to him.

  ‘She used me for some of the ancestral portraits in the Demand series…’

  David looked up; Jess was watching him, expecting something.

  ‘You know the early work, right? The Republic of Women, The Gynaeconaut…’

  ‘I mean, I’ve read a bit about them but…I remember the crockery, with the Greek slave girls and housewives?’

  ‘I was on four of the flags. Or at least my face was on two and my body was on two.’ Jess gestured with her cigarette at her shoulders and then her thighs, denoting the cut-off points. ‘And I’d just turned twenty-one. My parents were, well, you can imagine…Small-town Carolina…’

  David knew a bit about The Republic of Women. When Ruth had arrived at Goldsmiths there’d been a special lecture on it by his director of studies, the obese Mr Lawrence Booth, who had evidently loathed the whole thing; indeed had evidently loathed all women, republican or otherwise. Jess was still talking.

  ‘I think it was less about gender, and more about playing with cultural memory, traditions, historicity, domesticity…’

  If Glover had been with them, David would have added electricity, Kendal, Felicity, the Lovin’ Spoonful’s Summer in the City…but as it was, he nodded with renewed seriousness. He was getting cold. There was one plastic chair on the balcony and he wondered if it would be rude now to sit in it. He said, ‘I seem to remember some sort of enormous spaceship in the shape of a teapot.’ He smiled; Jess didn’t and he stopped. She shook her grey bob.

  ‘That was very late. Eighty-six, eighty-seven. I found most of that collection was a little misconceived, actually. I told Ruth at the time…But do you remember that exquisite woven rug with a woman weaving a rug on it? Imaging Penelope instead of Odysseus.’

  David was wondering about the other lit windows in the Barbican. That, and the fact that image was a verb now and no one had told him. The far towers and low-rises of this citadel with disabled access were randomly patched with these glowing squares, the yellow badges of habitation. Here were a thousand variations on the theme of New Year’s Eve, occurring just beyond the blinds and curtains. David flicked his cigarette out into the open night. It fell from sight immediately, without spark or significance.

  ‘So has James told you?’

  ‘Told me?’

  ‘Ruth said there was going to be an announcement.’

  ‘Oh my God, she’s not…’

  ‘I think she’s a little old for that.’

  Amazed, David turned towards the source of his amazement, and saw them in the living room, separated from him by the glass door. Glover, grinning idiotically, had seized Ruth from behind and now kissed her neck. She was holding a complex glass apparatus containing both balsamic vinegar and olive oil but she tilted her face forward in a drowsy motion, so her head was directly under the three lit bulbs: David noticed how the hair was thinning.

  They sat at the table as Larry docked a huge plate of risotto in the centre, and gave it one last stir, sweeping it to granulated banks and dunes. Inexplicably, he miaowed at David and everyone laughed. David had to tell himself to look away from Glover’s face, then from Ruth’s. Both had the same little secretive smile, both added an extra dimension of effort to their glances and their conversation.

  They were quorate, and at once Larry, as David knew he would, lifted his glass to make a toast; his pearl-and-silver cufflink hovered six inches from David’s face. He wore a large gold ring on his pinkie finger and the nails looked manicured, even and clean. His addiction, his oxygen, was money. He had refined himself as far as he wanted to go, and in doing so had found a steady, solid amount of joy in the world. He held everything at arm’s length, where he could see it properly. Jess, noticing the upraised glass, abruptly stopped talking.

  ‘I just wanted to propose a toast to Ruth fo
r allowing me to use the facilities of her kitchen this evening’—Larry turned from Ruth to nod his silver fringe at Walter—‘and to the philanthropist Walter Testa for granting her tenancy of that fine kitchen for six months to bring a little more art into the world, and, not forgetting, a toast to me for persuading Walter to let Ruth escape from New York and general heartbreak’—he paused and swung his glass to Glover—‘and to James, for putting a smile on that lovely face again, and again and again’—Ruth said ‘Larry!’ and gave a toothy, unattractive giggle—‘to Jess for her wonderful skirt’—the whole table laughed, and David felt stupidly nervous, as though he was going to be picked last, if at all, for the team—‘and her inspired photographs and her wonderfully toned physique, which I have to say is really quite a feat for someone now in the same decade as me’—smiling, Jess said, ‘I will throw this champagne over your shirt if you don’t…’—‘and lastly to David, our head cheerleader.’ Glover was grinning across the table, almost unable to stand the excitement. He began to push his chair back to stand up.

  Pyrotechnics

  David remembered the small shock of learning that other people didn’t sleep in the same posture as him. It had been the first year of some reality TV show, and he got into the habit of turning the portable on when he got into bed. It was company, the rows of sleepers arrayed in that night-vision grey. Some would be lying like saints on their plinths, on their backs, moonbathing. Some would be turned over on their sides, into the recovery position, or frozen mid-leap like fairy-tale characters; and some would have fallen flat on their guts, an ear pressed to the world, listening. Only one or two, like David, would be coiled in a C, a foetal crouch, protecting themselves from what came in their dreams.