by Patrick Gale
‘As you may have gathered from the radio silence, my life has been suffering a sea-change,’ Gus wrote. ‘Have severed communications with Louise and am anxious not to lose you in the ensuing drawing-up of ranks. Let’s have supper. Soon.’
On one heady impulse, she sacked the horrendous man whom no one had met, and invited Gus round for supper and sympathy.
She had planned to borrow a leaf from Loulou’s book. She had planned to question him mercilessly about his domestic disaster and shattered faith in love then offer a shoulder to cry on and a brave new bedfellow to help him forget. (‘Poor Gus’, bang). In the event, she sat back and watched the unfamiliar spectacle of herself losing control. After feeding him with what she knew to be his favourite dishes, shopped for and prepared with passionless care that afternoon, she started to tell the truth then could not stem the confessional tide.
‘I want you,’ she had told him, curled in her chair as he sprawled across her sofa. ‘I’ve wanted you ever since I first saw you in Nadia’s horrid green kitchen. And I hated Loulou because she had you and I only became her friend so as to find out more about you and get as close to you as I could. I thought she was vacuous and that you deserved better and then she started to…Gus, I knew everything. She told me everything and I didn’t tell you because I wanted her to be as unfaithful as possible. I thought that the more she slept around, the less likely you’d be to forgive her if ever you found out. Sometimes, knowing what I knew and not telling you, was more than I could stand. But I couldn’t tell you, you see, because I knew you loved her and that you’d hate whoever opened your eyes. So I couldn’t come between you. I had to wait. And now you’re probably wondering how best to extricate yourself from this appallingly tawdry little scene.’
But he had not left. Not until breakfast. And he had come back. Again and again.
As he drank cognac and she a small black coffee, she realized that they had made no plans for the night. Tomorrow was a bank holiday Monday, so there would be no need for him to get up early to be at his office. She had kept tomorrow free on purpose so as to share his day off but he had still said nothing. He talked about how depressing it was to watch one’s friends marry off, settle down and revise their address book according to their partner’s whims. She listened with half an ear, making sighed or chuckled responses where necessary, but she was thinking about that night, the next day and the following weekend. She wanted him to ask her back to the ‘smallish place’ in Islington that she had never seen. She wanted to wake up in his bed, feel his back beside her then fall asleep again only to have him rouse her later with coffee and a wet, late rose. (She watched the man and the youth leave. She saw the fleeting brush of his hand across the youth’s own.) She wanted to explore Gus’s bookshelves and record collection while he shaved. Would his flat be indescribably sordid, with a dirty frying pan on the stove and a mattress on a dusty floor, or was Gus hiding behind a landlord’s furniture and non-committal colours? She drained her cup to the bitter dregs and slid her miniature macaroons across the table to his eager hands.
‘Shall we, er?’ he asked, when he had finished munching. She hummed assent and smiled until he had to smile back. She watched as he summoned the bill, and she reached for her wallet.
‘Here,’ she said, crinkling a note at him.
‘No.’ He waved it away, deftly handing back the bill to the waiter with a piece of plastic tucked inside it. ‘You bought the tickets so this is on me.’
The tickets had cost far less, but she demurred for only an instant as his salary far outweighed her publisher’s most recent advance. Proportionately, her concert tickets had cost her several of his grand meals.
‘I’ll wait for you outside,’ she said and headed for the door.
‘Your coat, signorina.’
‘Of course. How stupid of me.’ She had forgotten her coat. She stood awkwardly as the waiter insisted on helping her on with it.
‘Buona notte,’ he said and held open the door with a grin.
‘Goodnight,’ she replied and went out.
The pavement was nearly empty, although it was not long past eleven. She had forgotten how even the West End could become suburban on Sunday nights. Autumn was coming. The sky was cloudless and there was a chill in the air. She watched a woman dancing, drunk, with her reflection in a darkened hairdresser’s window, then turned back, nervous, to see if Gus was coming. There he was, swinging into his cream mac with a frown, mildly irritated by a hovering waiter, and she knew that she would have to speak first. As he emerged on to the pavement he did not return her smile but the words were already on her lips. As good as spoken, so, ‘Dove adesso,’ she asked.
‘What?’
‘How shall we get back?’
‘Um. Look.’ He drew her alongside him with an arm across her shoulders. ‘We need to have a talk.’
We’ve talked too much already, she thought, panic clutching her from within. That’s our trouble. We’ve talked everything to death. We should hurry home, hurry to either of our homes and make rapid, violent love without a word being spoken. Then again, slowly, still in silence. Then make ourselves over to sleep. Tomorrow all will be well. Then. For now.
‘I’m all ears,’ she said brightly, making as if to meet his eye but seeing no further than his coat buttons before cowardice drove her to look straight ahead. They began to walk.
‘We’ve had a lovely time,’ he said swiftly. ‘A good time. And I’m very fond of you, but…’
‘But,’ she echoed.
Don’t say another word, she meant to say. Least of all fond. Fond, with its connotations of passing folly. I’ll find a taxi, leave you here and we’ll never meet again. Oh Christ, Christ, Christ. This is going to hurt, whatever you say, and the least you could do is let me go without you making a little speech to make your suffering less. The least you could do would be to shut up and hurt; suffer a part of what I…We shall have to meet in hot Christmas sitting rooms and bray delightedly.
They came to a line of scaffolding poles ranged along a length of pavement. She slipped apart from him and walked on the pavement’s edge so that the metal came between them. She was looking sternly ahead and felt that he was too. She pictured their two, pinched, white faces as an oncomer might see them. Second division terrorists trying to pass plans for an assassination without it being seen that they are known to one another. But the pavement was empty. They waited, obedient, at a crossing although there were no cars coming through the green lights.
‘But I don’t think we should carry on with the bed bit,’ he said. She said nothing. They walked on and she could find nothing to say. ‘Do you see?’ he asked eventually, as they came into Trafalgar Square and waited at another crossing.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s just that I can’t think of anything to say that isn’t banal.’
‘What a pity?’
‘Yes. That would do.’
No more words. Leave me. Let me go home. I want so much to go home.
‘How will you get home?’ he asked.
‘Walk in the right direction until I find a taxi, I suppose. What about you?’
‘Can I walk with you until you find one?’
‘If you like.’
Go away. Take your patrician nose and go away. No. No. Stay and get in the taxi with me. Come home. Unsay it all. Gainsay.
‘I think the trouble was that I’d got so used to not thinking of you in, well, that way. With Loulou around and everything and you were so…’
‘What?’
‘So horribly clever.’
‘That’s no reason. That’s a worthless thing to say.’
‘Yes it is.’
‘I moved too fast,’ she cut in. ‘I frightened you off.’
‘No. Not that.’
‘What, then?’
‘I don’t think it would have made any difference how fast you moved. I just wasn’t ready. Not for you. Not for anyone. Anything.’
‘I think I could tell,’ she said slowly.
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Of course she could tell. He had organized the entire weekend so that, while spending every hour together, they spent as many of them as possible out of doors, in public, away from any kind of bed. He had engineered the discussion over dinner. The disgusting, cold discussion. He thought he had prepared the ground so that it would be less of a shock for her. Well he made a lousy job of it.
‘I suppose, if the chemistry is wrong, then no amount of good will can help,’ she said, feeling cheapened by the words.
‘Yup,’ he said. ‘And believe me,’ this with an awkward little tug at her shoulders that made her teeter and graze one of her ankles on a heel, ‘there was plenty of it.’
They walked the length of Whitehall in total silence. Three late buses sailed past them, buses she could have taken to escape him, but she needed to hurt herself. She resolved on taking a taxi or nothing, knowing that taxis on the route she would take were rare. They reached Parliament Square and she clutched at a straw.
‘Look, Gus, this is silly. There are loads of cabs going in your direction. Leave me here. I’ll be fine.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yup. Easier on my own. I’ll be fine. But look, there’s some stuff of yours in my flat; that black jersey and some socks and things.’
‘Oh God. So there are. What are you doing tomorrow?’
‘Nothing much.’
‘Let’s meet for tea and you can give me them then.’
Success!
‘Where?’
‘St James’s. That funny sixties cafeteria place.’
‘Okay. Fourish?’
‘Make it five.’
‘All right. But are you sure?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well.’ She paused. ‘I could always post them to you.’
‘Don’t be stupid. I still want to see you, remember.’
‘Oh yes.’ Silly me, she thought, I forgot.
‘Here’s a cab,’ he said. ‘I must run.’
They tried to shake hands but she missed and ended up with a fistful of mackintosh. She waited until she heard his taxi door slam then allowed herself a brief wave as he escaped her up Whitehall.
She walked home along the North bank of the river and over Albert’s fairground of a bridge. Buses only passed her when she was between stops and taxis were either busy or going the wrong way and unwilling to turn back. She toyed with the idea of climbing the low railings into the small green space known as the Pimlico Shrubbery for a good weep, or abandoning herself to showier grief on a bench facing Battersea Power Station, but she preferred to walk and punish her elegantly shod feet. If she got home too soon, she would not sleep, thanks to the coffee she had drunk and the ideas circling wildly as to how she should approach tea-time tomorrow. A middle-aged black couple were having trouble starting their car at one point and she stopped to help the husband push it. When it started, he offered her a lift home but she said no thank you, she was almost there, although she had at least a mile to go. Pushing the car, she had broken the heel of one of her shoes.
Before letting herself in, she leaned into a neighbour’s skip to vomit all she had eaten in the restaurant. This was easily done; there had been gobbets of blood around the small bird’s bones and she had only to think of these. Sleep came, thick and dreamless. She woke with blisters on both big toes and fresh resolution in her heart.
She rarely wrote short stories. Her novels were fat, exhaustive expositions of character and possibility that drove critics to wield terms like sprawling or magisterial, and she found the smaller form unsatisfactory. The short stories she had written gained most of their poignancy from the fact of their being dismembered first chapters, and could not stand comparison with the more finished work of specialists. She had spoken truly in telling Gus that her novels made no use of autobiography. She left herself alone but, unconsciously, she did use her acquaintances, transmogrified with bits and pieces of each other. Her method resembled a child’s picture book whose pages were cunningly split into threes, enabling one to join head of stork with body of rhino and mermaid’s tail. Thus Janet’s temper might join with Edward’s charity in Susan’s body. Susan’s body was one of a kind, but neither she nor Janet nor Edward ever recognized their contributions to the hybrid result. Hardly surprising, since even the authoress frequently failed to recognize what she had done.
Though using real people, she had never drawn on real events. Real events were too hard to transplant; each had its peculiar logic and trailed sticky strands of cause and consequence that refused to adapt to the simpler systems of fiction. This morning’s material was different, however, because she would treat it in isolation with the bare minimum of adaptation. At least, that was the idea.
She was in the bath inspecting her blisters when the thought came to her, so she went straight back to bed, her head turbaned in a towel. She always worked in bed in the winter months because she suffered from the cold when immobile. She kept the computer on a hospital table that she could swing over the mattress before her as she sat cross-legged and furled in a quilt. The green letters sliding across her glasses, she worked for several hours without answering the telephone or pointed beseeching of the cat, and told the truth.
She wrote about how she had met Gus and Loulou, how she had inveigled her way into their lives and eventually into Gus’s bed. (Well…Gus into her bed.) She told how they had walked around Clapham looking at hurricane damage, how she had taken him to hear her favourite pianist playing her favourite Brahms intermezzo and how he had found her ugly after feeding her on a small, bleeding bird and hateful French liqueur. Ugly as sin. She told of her walk home. She changed the facts in only a few points. She had herself accept the lift from the middle-aged black couple, whose lasting devotion she then envied until they took her home for a drink and she saw their child’s wheelchair. She turned herself into a scholarly lesbian and she switched Gus and Loulou’s genders. Loulou became, with perhaps wanton cruelty, a philandering estate agent called Lucian, while Gus became Rose, an uncertain blonde. Gus had many faults, one of the more endearing of which was his failure to understand why lesbians should exist, much less to sympathize with what they might do. Even if she had herself and ‘her’ do exactly the same things in bed, he would never recognize himself in Rose.
She stopped writing towards three because it was time to feed the cat and dress for tea but also because she could not finish the story until she knew how their own would end. As long as she had been tapping at the computer keyboard, she had kept thoughts of the night before at a bearable distance, but as she brushed her hair and chose her clothes, the hurt returned. She realized that she still had not wept. For all the fluttering in her chest and the returning tightness in her throat, she found herself yet capable of selecting clothes with an unselected look and of lending a mournful pallor to her make-up with a pale powder she had once bought by mistake. His black jersey (surely one that Loulou had given him), a pair of very unwashed socks and a tie that was rather too wide, were in a carrier bag near the front door. She had gathered and folded them last night apparently, in a daze between vomiting dinner and brushing teeth.
She arrived at the cafeteria far too early, of course. He was nowhere in sight, so she forced herself to walk over to the crowded bridge to kill time. Several nondescript women and an elderly man with a crutch were leaning on the eastern railings staring crazily at the sparrows that clustered over their crumbfilled hands, as though this minor miracle were not something they indulged in every afternoon. A few children shouted amazement and a youth in a Chinese revolutionary cap filmed them on a Japanese camera. She walked on, past the hideous Walt Disney candelabra and crouched a while to watch the aggressive patrolling of a black swan. She should have brought it something to eat. She wondered if she could remember to return with a piece of cake when their tea was over. She held out her empty hands to it, fingers spread.
‘Sorry,’ she told it, then saw a woman crouched, photographing her from a few yards away. She had o
n a brilliant white dress that looked far too thin for the day and she wore her armfuls of almost pink red hair in a mane. The woman lowered the camera and smiled, showing her teeth, then stood to show that she was tall and built like Juno. She could not smile back so she stared. Then Gus called her name and set her free. She turned and hurried to the squat, round cafeteria where he was waiting.
‘There was a dreadful queue when I got here so I got us stuff without waiting for you. Do you mind?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Shall we sit in or out?’
‘Oh out, I think. It’s cold but the sunshine is so lovely.’
She led him to an empty table. There were no free-standing chairs, only circles of wood with fixed-on arms that splayed out from each central table column. It felt as if they were sitting at either side of some chaste playground mechanism; a miniature roundabout that, with a few thrusts from their short, childish legs, would set them gently turning, very safely, always equidistant.
‘While I remember,’ she said, and passed him the carrier bag.
‘Oh. Thanks,’ he said, feigning surprise then peering inside to make sure she had held on to nothing that was his. ‘My favourite,’ he said, inspecting the outside to see which shop it hailed from. ‘How clever of you. You got home okay?’