Collected Stories (42 page)

Eric said, ‘My children are going to be pretty angry with you when they find out what you’ve done to us.’

‘Yes,’ said Morgan. ‘Who could blame them?’

‘They’re big and expensive. They eat like horses.’

‘Christ.’

Eric said, ‘Do you know about my job?’

‘Not as much as you know about mine, I shouldn’t think.’

Eric didn’t respond, but said, ‘Funny to think of you two talking about me. I bet you’d lie there wishing I’d have a car crash.’

Morgan blinked.

‘It’s prestigious,’ Eric said. ‘In the newsroom, you know. Well paid. Plenty of action, continuous turnover of stories. But it’s bland, worthless. I can see that now. And the people burn out. They’re exhausted, and on an adrenalin rush at the same time. I’ve always wanted to take up walking … hill-walking, you know, boots and rucksacks. I want to write a novel. And travel, and have adventures. This could be an opportunity.’

Morgan wondered at this. Caroline had said that Eric took little interest in the outside world, except through the medium of journalism. The way things looked, smelled, tasted, held no fascination for him; nor did the inner motives of living people. Whereas Morgan and Caroline, dawdling in a bar with their hands playing on one another, loved to discuss the relationships of mutual acquaintances, as if together they might distil the spirit of a working love.

Morgan picked up his car keys. He said, ‘Sounds good. You’ll be fine then, Eric. Best of luck.’

‘Thanks a bunch.’

Eric showed no sign of moving.

He said, ‘What do you like about her?’

Morgan wanted to shout at him, he wanted to pound on the table in front of him, saying, I love the way she pulls down her clothes, lies on her side and lets me lick and kiss her soft parts, as if I have lifted the dish of life up to my face and burst through it into the wonderland of love for ever!

Eric was tensing up. ‘What is it?’

‘What?’

‘You like about her! If you don’t know, maybe you would be good enough to leave us alone!’

‘Look, Eric,’ Morgan said, ‘if you calm yourself a minute, I’ll say this. More than a year ago, she said she wanted to be with me. I’ve been waiting for her.’ He pointed at Eric. ‘You’ve had your time with her. You’ve had plenty. I would say you’ve had enough. Now it’s my turn.’

He got up and walked to the door. It was simple. Then it felt good to be outside. He didn’t look back.

Morgan sat in the car and sighed. He started off and stopped at the lights on the corner. He was thinking he would go to the supermarket. Caroline could come round after work and he would cook. He would mix her favourite drink, a whisky mac. She would appreciate being looked after. They could lie down together on the bed.

Eric pulled open the door, got in, and shut the door. Morgan stared at him. The driver behind beeped his horn repeatedly. Morgan drove across the road.

‘Do you want me to drop you somewhere?’

‘I haven’t finished with you,’ said Eric.

Morgan looked alternately at the road and at Eric. Eric was sitting in his car, in his seat, with his feet on his rubber mat.

Morgan was swearing under his breath.

Eric said, ‘What are you going to do? Have you decided?’

Morgan drove on. He saw that Eric had picked up a piece of paper from the dashboard. Morgan remembered it was a shopping list that Caroline had made out for him. Eric put it back.

Morgan turned the car round and accelerated.

‘We’ll go to her office now and discuss it with her. Is that what you want? I’m sure she’ll tell you everything you want to know. Otherwise – let me know when you want to get out,’ said Morgan. ‘Say when.’

Eric just stared ahead.

Morgan thought he had been afraid of happiness, and kept it away; he had been afraid of other people, and had kept them away. He was still afraid, but it was too late for that.

Suddenly he banged the steering wheel and said, ‘Okay.’

‘What?’ said Eric.

‘I’ve decided,’ said Morgan. ‘The answer is yes. Yes to everything! Now you must get out.’ He stopped the car. ‘Out, I said!’

Driving away, he watched Eric in the mirror getting smaller and smaller.

Ian lay back in the only chair in the room in Paris, waiting for Marina to finish in the bathroom. She would be some time, since she was applying unguents – seven different ones, she had told him – over most of her body, rubbing them in slowly. She was precious to herself.

He was glad to have a few minutes alone. There had been many important days recently; he suspected that this would be the most important and that his future would turn on it.

For the past few mornings, before they went out for breakfast, he had listened to Schubert’s Sonata in B Flat Major, which he had not previously known. Apart from a few pop tapes, it was the only music in Anthony’s flat. Ian had pulled it out from under the futon on their first day there.

Now, as he got up to play the CD, he glimpsed himself in the wardrobe mirror and saw himself as a character in a Lucian Freud painting: a middle-aged man in a thin, tan raincoat, ashen-faced, standing beside a dying pot plant, overweight and with, to his surprise, an absurd expression of hope, or the desire to please, in his eyes. He would have laughed, had he not lost his sense of humour.

He turned the music up. It concealed the voices that came from a nearby children’s school. They reminded him of his daughter, who was staying, at the moment, with her grandmother in London. Ian’s wife, Jane, had been taken to hospital. He had to discuss this with Marina, who didn’t yet know about it. She did not want to hear about his wife and he did not want to talk about her. But unless he did, his wife would continue to shadow him – both of them – darkening everything.

Although Ian had been a pop kid, and overawed by what he imagined classical music meant, he listened avidly to the Schubert sonata, sometimes walking up and down. No matter how often he heard it, he could not remember what came next; what it said to him he did not know, as the piece had no distinct overall mood. He liked the idea of it being music he would never understand; that seemed to be an important part of it. It was a relief, too, that he still had the capacity to be aroused and engrossed, as well as consoled. Some mornings he woke up wanting to hear the piece.

He and Marina had spent ten days in the tiny flat belonging to Ian’s closest friend and business partner, Anthony, who had a French lover or mistress. On the rue du Louvre, the apartment was well situated for walks, museums and bars, but it was on the sixth floor. Marina found it an increasing strain to mount the narrow, warped wooden stairs. Not that they went out more than once a day. The weather had been fresh and bright, but it was freezing. The flat was cold, apart from where it was too hot, beside the electric fire attached to the wall, where the only armchair stood.

What was between him and Marina? Had they only dreamed one another? He did not know, even now. All he could do was find out by living through to the end every sigh and shout of their stupid, wonderful, selfish love. Then they would both know if they were able to go on.

He had listened to the sonata twice by the time she came in, naked, holding her stomach. She lowered herself onto the futon to dress. He had yearned for days and months and years for her, and now could not remember if they were speaking or not.

‘Don’t get cold,’ he said.

‘I’ve got nothing to wear.’

Few of her skirts and trousers fitted now she was pregnant. He himself had left London with two pairs of trousers and three shirts, one of which Marina was usually wearing. It had made him

feel like a thief to think of removing his clothes from the flat he had shared with his wife, particularly when she was not there. He had fewer possessions now than he had had as a student, twenty years ago.

He said, ‘We must buy some clothes.’

‘How much money do we have left?’

‘One of the credit cards is still working. At least it was last night.’

‘How will we pay it off?’

‘I’ll get a job.’

She snorted. ‘Really?’

Before they left London she had been turned down for a job because she was pregnant.

He said, ‘Maybe in an off-licence. Why are you laughing?’

‘You – so delicate, so proud – selling beers and crisps.’

He said, ‘It’s important to me – not to let you down.’

‘I’ve always supported myself,’ she said.

‘You can’t now.’

‘Can’t I?’

He said, ‘Anthony might lend me some money. You haven’t forgotten that he’s coming this afternoon?’

‘We can’t keep asking him for money.’

‘I love you,’ he said.

She looked at him. ‘That’s good.’

The previous evening they had walked to a restaurant near the Jardins du Luxembourg, and had talked of how seriously the Parisians took their food. The waiters were professional waiters, rather than students, and the food was substantial and old-fashioned, intended to be eaten rather than looked at. The older people tucked wide napkins into their fronts and the children sat on cushions on their seats.

‘This was my dream, when I was a teenager,’ Marina had said, ‘to come to Paris to live and work.’

‘We’re living in Paris now,’ he had replied. ‘Sort of.’

She said, ‘I didn’t imagine it would be like this. In these conditions.’

Her bitter remark made him feel he had trapped her; perhaps she felt the same. As they walked back, in silence, he wondered who she was, the layer upon layer of her. They were peeling and scraping, both hoping to find the person underneath, as if it would reveal the only useful truth. But in the end you had to live with all of someone else.

He and Marina had been to Paris, on an invented business trip, over a year ago, but otherwise they had met only intermittently. These ten days were the longest they had been together. She still kept a room in a house with other young people. Her pregnancy made the women envious and confused, and the boys over-curious as to why she kept the father’s name a secret.

When Ian left his wife, he and Marina had spent a few nights together in Anthony’s London house. Anthony lived alone; the house was large and painted white, with stripped floorboards, the latest style. It was almost bare, apart from several pale, expensive sofas, and resembled a stage set, ready for the actors to start. But Ian felt like a trespasser and told Anthony he had to get away. Five years before, they had started a film production company together. However, Ian had not been to work for almost three months. He had instructed Anthony to freeze his salary and had walked about the city drunk, talking only to the mad and derelict, people who did not know him. If you made yourself desperately sick you had to live in the present; there was nowhere else. But killing yourself was a difficult and time-consuming job and Anthony had made him stop doing it. Ian did not know whether he could go back to work. He had no idea what he was doing. This was partly why Anthony was coming to Paris, to extract a decision from Ian.

Ian could not forget how generous Anthony had been. It was at his insistence and expense that Ian and Marina had travelled to Paris and stayed in his apartment.

‘Go and see whether you two want to be together,’ he had said. ‘Stay there as long as you like. Then let me know.’

‘Everyone’s advised me to give her up and go back to Jane. They keep telling me how nice Jane is. I can’t do that, but they think I’m a fool …’

‘Be a fool and to hell with everyone else,’ Anthony had said.

As Marina dressed now, Ian knew they were close to a permanent break. They had had their time in Paris and the distance between them was considerable. In the past few days she had talked of returning to London, finding a small flat, getting a job, and bringing up the child alone. Many women did that now; it seemed almost a matter of pride. He would be redundant. It was important for her to feel she could get by without him, he saw that. But if their love, from a certain point of view, seemed like a dangerous addiction, he had to persuade her that they had a chance together, even though, half the time, he did not believe it himself. He did not want to fight; everything was going to hell and that was the fate he had to submit to. But a part of him was not ready to submit. Believing in fate was an attempt to believe you had no will of your own and he did not want that, either.

‘I’m hungry,’ she said.

‘We’ll eat then.’

He helped her to her feet.

She said, ‘I’ve been feeling dizzy.’

‘Tell me at any time if you want to sit down, and a chair will be produced.’

‘Yes. Thank you.’

He held her, leaning forward over her stomach.

She said, ‘I’m so glad you’re here.’

‘I’ll always be here, if you want me.’

She regarded herself in the mirror. ‘I look like a penguin.’

‘Let’s set out across the tundra, then,’ he said.

‘Don’t mock me.’

‘I’m sorry if I’ve offended you.’

‘Let’s not start,’ she said.

She was anxious, now her breasts were full, her cheeks red, and her arms, legs and thighs sturdy, that he had loved only her slimness and youth. She felt weary, too, and seemed, in her late twenties, to have passed into another period of her life, without wanting to. All she wanted, most of the time, was to lie down. Veins showed through the pale skin of her legs; every evening she asked him to massage her aching ankles. But her skin was clear; her long hair shone. There was no spare flesh on her. She was taut, pressed to the limit; and healthy.