by Tim Jeal
‘Time we went shopping together. You need some new clothes.’
‘Do I?’ asked Derek hesitantly.
‘I’ll meet you outside the tube station at half-past five.’ She had not bothered to lower her voice and Professor Elkin was looking at her disapprovingly. She gave him a friendly wave as she went out. Derek was still trying to work out what her evident change of mood meant when five o’clock came.
Having politely ejected Elkin and the Kenyan, Derek locked all the manuscript boxes used by readers during the day into the safe upstairs. Security arrangements at the Institute amused him. He liked to imagine a small band of historians with masks, sticks of gelignite and metal-cutting-gear, blasting their way into the main archives and making away with everything. But scholarly thieves, he reflected bitterly, were rather less spectacular than bank robbers in the manner of their operations: a letter furtively slipped into a briefcase or casually folded between innocent pages of notes, all under the archivist’s eye—that was their cowardly way. That was how almost the entire Raffles collection had disappeared two years before.
Outside in the evening sunlight Derek started walking towards his rendezvous with Diana. Across the road on the building-site the pile-driver thumped out a brisk marching rhythm. Buses, cars, motor-bicycles, taxis, even the occasional invalid-carriage swept by as the heart of the city pumped men and metal outwards towards far-flung suburbs. The sun glittered on office windows and secretaries hurried home on high heels. Cotton frocks and flimsy underwear. Women wear less in summer. To rub genitals against the thighs or buttocks of strangers in the tube is called ‘frotteurism’ and is an offence: technically an assault. It is virtually impossible not to assault people in the tube. Fascinus was a classical god whose image was the erect male organ. Virgins celebrated his festival with ceremonies of public defloration; their implement was a suitably sized replica of the god. The useless verbal lumber in Derek’s head was extensive, and growing year by year; the thought did not displease him; words to replace dying brain cells. A losing battle but life was that anyway, little man against an unfathomable universe. Libraries and archives were arsenals for the battle against time, voices for the dead, and archivists pursued the noble cause of guarding the produce of brains long since decomposed. There were other ways to look at it, and Derek often looked at it in other ways. Libraries were vomitoriums, places for storing gobbets of half-digested matter for living men to feed upon, escapist palaces where past regurgitations could make the present palatable.
Some distance from the tube station Derek could see a gradually increasing traffic jam. The cause of it seemed to be an untidily parked car not unlike the Cushing family saloon; inside it was a woman not unlike Mrs Cushing. The resemblance was too great for coincidence. Derek started to run towards the offending vehicle. Diana flung open the passenger-seat door and motioned him to get in. From the direction she drove off in, Derek assumed that they were on their way to the crowded chaos of Oxford Street.
They had blundered through the semi-darkness of five boutiques before reaching the one where Diana spotted what she thought Derek could do with for the summer: a light cotton suit in a delicate pale-blue material, with a battledress-style jacket and breast pockets picked out with darker blue thread at the edges. Derek was so delighted with his wife’s apparent recovery that he did not feel able to suggest that brown, green or even mustard versions of the same would have looked less overtly homosexual. Struggling into the light blue hipster trousers behind a flimsy curtain, he found that their figure-hugging cut was such that if he wore them regularly, his testicles would be forced into his lower abdomen. Armed with this certainty he objected, making sure to look disappointed rather than relieved. In the end Diana chose him a blue-and-white-striped jacket and an innocuous pair of beige flared trousers.
Before her recent malaise Diana had always decided what clothes he should buy, so Derek saw her resumption of this habit as a sign that all would now be well. Incredibly he appeared to have won a significant marital victory. He had never minded Diana’s desire to dress him up in clothes more suitable for men ten years younger, and today he minded still less. She had often told him that he was burnt-out and dull, so he had never resented her attempt to make him look more vital and alive. It was rather like the macabre habit of some undertakers who put rouge on the cheeks of corpses to make them more life-like, but there was no sense in getting worked up, even though he could not share the spurious sense of individuality experienced by many who bought fashionable clothes. But better to adopt off-the-peg fashion than off-the-peg ideas. Whatever indignities his acquiescence inflicted on his appearance, his mental clothing, he hoped, remained his own.
*
The sitting-room in the Cushings’ flat was a large room with a high ceiling and french windows leading out on to the narrow balcony. They had inherited half the furniture from the previous tenants, whose taste had been unusual. There was a terrible standard lamp with peculiar fluted swellings carved at intervals on the wooden column, a large reproduction Jacobean table and an equally dark and heavy-looking sideboard. Diana had tried to brighten up the flat by putting down a red carpet but this had merely emphasized the sombreness of the furniture. Two modern chairs, with metal frames and canvas seats, also tended to accentuate the bulk of the large Victorian sofa with its ornate wooden scrolls on the arms. Diana particularly liked ferns, palms and other rubbery dark-leaved plants, which, Derek thought, gave the room an unnatural underwater look. Diana tossed him his parcel of clothes.
‘Don’t just stand there. Take off your trousers.’
Derek did as he was asked and then slipped on his new garments. Diana watched him critically. She had often told him that his legs were short and stubby, quite wrong for his long torso, and that his head was too large for the width of his shoulders. Derek had always admitted she was right. She looked him up and down for a few moments and smiled.
‘You’ll do,’ she said generously.
Derek stood awkwardly in the middle of the room.
‘All dressed up and nowhere to go,’ he said.
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ she replied after a pause. ‘The jacket looks just right for the sea.’
Since they rarely went to the sea, Derek decided she was being sarcastic. He was mistaken.
‘Charles rang up this afternoon,’ she went on. ‘He’s bought a house on a Cornish estuary; wants us to stay there for a couple of weeks.’
Diana’s evident excitement made Derek cautious. He hated sitting on beaches and swimming.
‘That’s jolly good of him,’ he said. ‘Of course there shouldn’t be any problem about getting time off. When does he want us to go?’
‘Last week in July and the first in August.’
Derek sank down on to the Victorian sofa.
‘I see,’ he replied quietly. How could she possibly have forgotten that he had arranged to spend those very weeks in Edinburgh at the National Library of Scotland going through the Macnair papers: documents vital to his East African research. So that was her game. She’d clean up the house and stop messing him around if he gave up his crucial research trip. Diana was going on about how much Giles would enjoy himself. He could even learn to sail, and the opportunity for looking for his precious rocks along the sea shore could scarcely be bettered. Derek had a very fair idea of how Diana would respond if he said he intended going on with his research. What sort of a man could put a load of yellowing papers before a child’s enjoyment? If his research actually had any importance she might feel differently, but what was it except a dead-end subject about dead people? A convenient escape from the real world and real people.
‘Those were the only dates?’ he asked helplessly.
Diana nodded. ‘So I can let him know it’s all right?’
He took a deep breath and prepared himself for the worst. ‘I’m going to Scotland then.’
‘Doing what?’ said Diana, as though he had just made a uniquely disgusting proposition. ‘You can’t intend t
o prevent us going.’
Derek put his head in his hands. Dear God, to think that he’d thought he had won a victory over the flat and her lethargy; if he had, she was going to make him pay for it all right. She wasn’t even remotely aware of the ludicrous irony that all her efforts of the last six weeks had been designed to make him assert himself, and now, when he did so, she wanted him to revert to his old obsequiousness. Suddenly the solution came to him.
‘You go,’ he exclaimed triumphantly, as though announcing an idea of amazing brilliance. ‘You and Giles go to Cornwall and I’ll go to Scotland.’ He smiled at her and started laughing. ‘That’s the answer.’
To his surprise Diana did not argue with him. He had been sure he would have to deliver a lengthy monologue on his personal feelings in order to convince her that he would ruin the holiday rather than contribute to it, but now, mercifully, there was no need.
A few moments later Diana said, ‘Apart from my wanting you to come, don’t you think Charles is going to find your refusal rather peculiar?’
Derek laughed. ‘He only likes me because he thinks I’m peculiar.’
Diana laughed too and asked no further questions. Derek had known Charles Lamont for almost twenty years, but did not exactly like him. Yet Charles went on asking him to dinner parties and he went on accepting because he didn’t dislike the man either. Derek certainly wasn’t jealous of Charles’s wealth or his successful art gallery, nor did he feel hurt by his near-certainty that Charles only enjoyed producing him at dinner parties to demonstrate the wide range of his acquaintance. You see, I don’t just meet people in the art and business worlds, and here to prove it from the eccentric world of scholarship is Derek Cushing, the unassuming archivist. Ever been to the Afro-Asian Institute, by the way? No? I’m not surprised at all; it’s the sort of place one thought had died with the Empire. Straight out of the Victorian era: masses of pictures of Empire builders and elephants all jumbled up with Rhodes’s inkwell and Livingstone’s toe, and thousands of books which nobody reads. Yes, it is a funny sort of job, but he doesn’t seem to mind. Lives in a dark and cavernous flat near Kilburn. It’s in one of those mock Tudor monstrosities; all white plasterwork and fake beams. Strange thing is he’s got a rather good-looking wife. That’s her over there; the bored one with that slightly embittered look. I was at university with Derek, same college; the dons all said he was brilliant. And today … well, look at him. But there’s something rather attractive about lost causes and wasted opportunities. Derek’s the best example of it I know. I’m thinking of having him stuffed actually; something for my private collection. I wouldn’t be able to sell him in my gallery, but at home he’ll look rather fine with the Etruscan statuary. Of course it was just possible, Derek conceded, that he had misjudged Charles, but he didn’t think so.
So he had saved his research and Giles and Diana would get a good holiday in Cornwall; for the first time in weeks Derek felt happy. To think how narrowly he had escaped the tedium of lying for hours on some nasty beach with his stubby legs burning, and the top of his head going redder and redder and starting to peel, and suffering the enforced bonhomie and the drinking, and the walks in the rain, to show that one was determined to make the most of every situation, and the conversations about plays and films and art and life and above all the gratitude for what we have received at your lovely house in such lovely country and, yes, how incredibly clever of you to have got it all for only seventy thousand and …
‘I’ll ring him and explain,’ offered Derek magnanimously.
‘I’d be much happier if you came,’ murmured Diana.
But Derek was already dialling Charles’s number.
Chapter 2
Shortly after 4.00 p.m. on July 13, ten days before his scheduled departure for Scotland, Derek Cushing lifted the receiver of his phone in the Afro-Asian Institute and dialled his dentist’s number. Derek was not worried about his teeth but wished to leave a message for his wife, who had informed him that morning that she had a dental appointment for four o’clock. The receptionist was apologetic and regretted that she could not give Mrs Cushing a message, since to her certain knowledge no Mrs Cushing had an appointment that afternoon. Did Mrs Cushing have an appointment on any other day that week? The receptionist denied knowledge of any such appointment. Derek thanked her and rang off. He had simply wished to let Diana know that he intended going straight from work to the address where they were having dinner and would not go home first.
Diana could be absent-minded and mistake a day, but to mistake the week of a dental appointment was taking absent-mindedness further than Derek thought probable. She had lied to him on occasions in the past and he had been known to lie to her and perhaps there was nothing in it, and if there was something in it perhaps it didn’t matter anyway. If she felt like telling him that she had gone to the dentist and had instead spent the afternoon in a sauna bath, that was her business. Derek was irritated only because he now felt impelled to go back to the flat before going on to the dinner party.
At breakfast the following day, after eating an all but hard-boiled egg without complaint, Derek cleared a visual path between the three large packets of cereal on the table and said, ‘I really am a selfish sod. I forgot to ask how you got on at the dentist.’
‘Better late than never,’ replied Diana. ‘A couple of fillings; that was all. I’ve got to go back on Friday to let the hygienist have a go at my gums. Hygienist, my foot; it’s as bad as calling dustmen “disposal operatives”.’
So she had added another lie. If one lie was innocuous, were two lies rather different?
‘Why did you change dentists?’ Derek asked abruptly.
She was buttering some toast. He watched carefully to see whether her knife stopped dead or whether she seemed put out in any less obvious way.
‘Christ, how awful. You didn’t go to meet me at Gilchrist’s, did you?’
‘I phoned and you didn’t have an appointment.’
‘I’m surprised I didn’t tell you. I’ve got a new man.’
‘What was wrong with Gilchrist?’
There was no sign of embarrassment, no surprise, no evidence of quick thinking. Diana took a sip of coffee and smiled.
‘I didn’t like Gilchrist’s eyes. I don’t suppose you’ve noticed, but they’re yellow, not the pupils but the whites. They’re usually bloodshot too. They made me feel ill, the way he used to peer into my mouth with his eyeballs brushing my cheeks.’
‘And the new dentist has white whites?’
‘Very white. He’s an Indian so I suppose that might make them seem whiter than they are.’
‘Should I go to him too?’
‘If you don’t like Gilchrist’s eyes, it mightn’t be a bad idea.’
Could anybody possibly leave a dentist because of the whites of their eyes? Derek pondered the question for a few moments before conceding that Diana was capable of it. Or had she just thought of it there and then? Suddenly he felt irritated. Nobody ought to leave dentists because of their eyeballs. That might be a reason to leave an oculist. The only physical defect that could possibly justify leaving a dentist was a mouthful of bad teeth; no, delirium tremens and Parkinson’s disease should be added.
‘I’ve never heard such a lousy reason for leaving a dentist,’ he said. Diana was looking at him with unfeigned surprise. He was being assertive, which was unusual enough, but, more unusual still, he was being assertive at breakfast. ‘What I mean is,’ he went on, ‘I don’t understand such a reason.’
Diana lit a cigarette and exhaled twintusks of smoke from her nostrils. She seemed amused now.
‘I would have thought I’d made it pretty clear. Anyway, why should you understand? Is my one aim and object in life meant to be making myself comprehensible to you?’ she paused and then added, ‘There’s no reason to look so persecuted. You’ve as good as said you don’t believe me. Fine. If you don’t, it’s your tough titty.’
‘Thank you for being so explicit.’
&nbs
p; ‘Pleasure,’ she replied.
Diana had started to read the paper, and since Derek could think of nothing else to say he left for work.
*
For Derek the morning rush-hour was a special violation. He was convinced that people who worked in shops or other crowded places did not detest the shoulder-to-shoulder pressure and the constant buffeting as he did. How could they know the agony of the timid archivist, accustomed only to the womb-like security of his library, when he was plunged into the alien maelstrom of the commuters’ cauldron? On some mornings Derek managed to establish a scholarly distance to the whole sub-human business by making classical comparisons: Charon the ticket-office clerk to whom he gave his coin, the lift Charon’s boat, the doors of the train the gates of Hades, and Pluto himself the power of money that sucked all men into the bowels of the earth. But on this particular morning such thoughts held no consolation. In the tube, just as the train was leaving Baker Street, it came to Derek that Diana had been lying to him. Since she lied to him quite often, it was not the lying itself that alarmed him, but the conclusion that on this particular occasion it might matter that she had lied. Although he mistrusted intuition he could not escape this feeling. My wife, Mrs Cushing, has this morning attempted to persuade me that she spent the greater part of Wednesday afternoon at the premises of an Indian dentist. If she lied to me what am I to understand? Derek was now on the escalator, gliding upwards past many underwear advertisements. Dear Mr Cuckold, if you are so blindly and wilfully stupid, is it surprising that your wife is deceiving you, deceiving you furthermore with grotesque and improbable stories? Can you think of any reason except the most obvious one why your wife should have lied to you? Pure bloody-mindedness is admittedly a possibility, and a desire to tease, irritate and wound should not automatically be ruled out; but since your wife has recently started an afternoon course in antique furniture restoration, and has during the last four months purchased as much clothing as in the past four years, can you reasonably suggest that such arguments hold water?