He Wants (2 page)

2

He does not want soup

‘
Y
OU DON'T WANT
anything, do you, Dad?' says Ruth, on her way out of the living room. Lewis opens his mouth to reply, but he can't decide whether he does or not, he can't say what he might want, so he doesn't say anything.

Ruth takes their teacups through to the kitchen, puts them heavily into the sink and turns on the tap.

It is still close enough to winter to be dark outside at getting-up time. Ruth complains about having to drag herself out of her warm bed at what feels like four o'clock in the morning, but Lewis rather likes how it feels to wash his face in the bathroom sink before it is light. It makes him feel like a man with a job to do, like a farmer rising before dawn, like a jet-setter with an early flight to catch.

It is dark, still, when Ruth drops her boy off at his new nursery. She has said to Lewis that it must seem to the boy as if she is leaving him with strangers in the middle of the night. ‘Yes,' said Lewis, ‘it probably does.'

By the time she gets to Lewis's house, though, it is almost light.

Sitting in his armchair in front of the television, Lewis can see her standing looking out of the kitchen window while she waits for the water to run warm, her fingertips in the cold drizzle. The snowdrops are still out and the daffodils should soon be through. She raises her voice to say to him, ‘Your lawn's looking a bit dead.' He once pointed out an azalea that had turned bright red – not just its flowers but its leaves as well were all scarlet, glorious, and Ruth told him it was dying. You got a final show, she said, this burst of beauty before it expired. He'd had an oleander, too, of which he was rather fond, but she took one look and said it was poisonous and that it had to go. She would not let the boy play in Lewis's garden until the plant had gone, and even now she will not let the boy go in there, because if some toxic part of it is still lying around he will put it in his mouth.

Whenever Ruth glances at Lewis's garden, he holds his breath, wondering what's coming, what will have to go.

She washes out the cups and then stands in the kitchen doorway, drying her hands on a tea towel while she tells him about the course she is thinking of taking. ‘I am going to do one this year,' she says. For years, she has been planning on doing a degree, trying to decide on one: French, with German or Italian or Spanish, with a year abroad, perhaps in Paris; or French with Chinese, a year in China; or French with European Studies or Global Studies or Philosophy, or Modern Languages with History of Art. Now that she has the boy she has been looking into evening classes instead, languages without the year abroad. She goes back into the kitchen to hang the damp tea towel over the cold radiator.

‘What about the boy?' calls Lewis. ‘I can look after him.'

‘John will look after him,' she says.

Yes, thinks Lewis, John will look after him. John is a good man, a good father, and hospitable to Lewis, even though Lewis cannot bear, now, to be in a room with him.

Lewis has sometimes thought about retaking his maths A level, in which he had got such a disappointing grade. He does not know where his old textbooks are though. He does not want to have to buy them all over again. He says to Ruth, ‘Do you know where my old maths books are?'

‘No,' she says. ‘What maths books? You don't mean your old school books? What do you want them for? It's all done differently now, you know. Everything's changed since your day.' She wanders over to the bookshelves. ‘You're always losing your books.'

He has only recently noticed just how many Bliss Tempest novels Edie managed to accumulate. They were just about all she read, and she read them repeatedly. She read them in bed; he would switch off his lamp and she would still be reading. There was always one on her bedside table. He has been finding them all over the house, in fact. He has been collecting them up and putting them back onto his wife's shelf in the living room. She probably has the writer's entire oeuvre. Some of them, she once told him, were out of print and could only be got from second-hand bookshops or private collectors. ‘They might be worth something one day,' she said. The men in them always reminded her of Lewis. She mentioned this to him and he was amused to imagine himself as a character in a romance because he did not think of himself as a romantic man. He himself has never read these well-thumbed books of Edie's. His books are on the shelves above – his literature, along with his father's, the bibles and reference books.

Despite his efforts, though, despite the returning of all these books to the shelves, there are still gaps where there should not be gaps, spaces at which he stares, wondering what is missing, becoming anxious about books that might have been borrowed and might never be returned.

Edie used to drive the mobile library to the villages, scattering books, it seemed to Lewis, far and wide, driving off leaving them strewn, like the books she sometimes left behind in hotel rooms or on the roof of their car as they drove away. She claimed not to do this, but she did; the books went missing.

Lewis remembers how the library tipped very slightly towards you as you entered, when you put your weight on the steps, and how it swayed underfoot while you were browsing. In the mobile library, the librarian still stamps the book's paper insert, printing the date in black or purple ink, just like in real libraries in the sixties. In the town library now, you don't take your books to the lady behind the desk, you put your books into an opening in a big, black machine that scans them. You can leave without speaking to a soul.

When Edie retired, she missed driving the mobile library, doing her rounds, seeing the countryside, and so Lewis, who had not been to the smaller villages for a very long time, drove her out there. He remembers pointing out some cows he saw galloping across a field. ‘Cows don't gallop,' said Edie, who had not noticed them. But Lewis had seen them; he had seen them galloping through the thick grass. He loved driving through the countryside and the villages, slowing for horses, pausing to admire some particularly attractive cottage, coming to a stop outside the only house in a terrace that was not plastered and painted or clad, its bare bricks giving it an exposed and vulnerable appearance. Later, he went back on his own, although he found the drive lonely without Edie. Coming to a stop outside that unclad house, he sat gazing towards it, his engine idling. He eyed the fine yellow car parked in the street at the front, and peered down the side of the house towards the back door, which was ajar. He saw the grey head of a man bent forward in the garden, working his way along the borders. He could not see the man's face. Lewis wound down his window, his engine still running. The man, slowly standing, a few dead plants hanging from his hands, looked out towards the street and, through narrowed eyes, saw Lewis. ‘He isn't here,' shouted the man. Or he would see Lewis from the front window and come to the front door to shout across the road, ‘He isn't here. He doesn't live here.'

Lewis no longer drives. Ruth is relieved. She always expected something to happen to him. She gave him a mobile phone, just in case he got into trouble, but he never needed to use it. He drove for more than fifty years without having an accident, except for one incident in a rental car. He took it back expecting to have a row, to have to pay through the nose. It would be on the bank statement, he thought, for Edie to see and query. He would have to admit to carelessness, dangerous driving, reckless behaviour. The man at the rental company did not raise an eyebrow though. He said it was nothing, just a scratch, and did not even charge him; he just let him walk away. In the end, Lewis stopped driving because of his painful knee. He keeps the mobile phone in a drawer in the kitchen.

‘I doubt you realise what you've lost anyway,' says Ruth, looking at his bookshelves. ‘You never remember what you've read.'

It is true. There are books he's had for decades that he thought he'd never got round to opening, and then when he did finally read them, he remembered, as he neared the end, that he had in fact read this before; or he found his own pencilled notes in the margins, perhaps a hundred pages in.

‘I've put some soup in the fridge for your tea,' says Ruth. ‘Are you going to get dressed? Maybe go out and get some fresh air later? You haven't been out of the house all week.'

‘I've been to the bin,' says Lewis. (He stood at his boundary, with one hand on the lid of his wheely bin. It has the number of his house painted on it, so that it will not get lost. The zero is a foot across. He watched a plane go overhead.)

Ruth is in the hallway now, putting on her coat before coming back for a kiss. He never knows what part of him she's aiming for. She kisses the edge of his ear, his hair. ‘I'm off now,' she says.

‘All right,' he says.

She has to slam the door behind her because it won't close properly otherwise. When Lewis hears the bang, the rattle of the letterbox, he stands and makes his way to the front room. He watches through the window, through the net curtain, as she walks to the gate. When he sees that her car is parked out there, he is surprised. Her house is only down the road and the office where she works is just a bit further on. She always walks; she never does the journey by car.

Getting in behind the wheel, she puts her soup bag down on the passenger seat, straps herself in and drives away without looking back at the house. She keeps Susan Boyle in the CD player. She likes ‘I Dreamed a Dream'. She sings along.

He notices, too, that she is not driving towards the office. She seemed, he thinks, to be in a bit of a rush. He wonders where she is going, what errand she might be running in her little car. And was she wearing a new coat?

He looks at the stone lion standing in concrete at the far end of the path, its head turned towards him, facing the house. It ought really to be watching the gate. They usually come in pairs, he thinks, these guardians of gateways. He only got the one. Ruth used to love that lion. Her pushchair always had to be stopped beside it so that she could reach out and pet its hard head, run her hand over the cold furrows of its brow. There is a layer of lichen on the stone now. It is powdery to the touch.

When Ruth is no longer in sight, Lewis turns away. He goes back into the living room and switches off the television before heading to the kitchen to look at his lawn from the window. He does not think it is dying, except perhaps in certain places where it has been used as a toilet by the neighbourhood's cats. He should get a dog to keep these intruders at bay. He used to have one, but it got out and was lost, perhaps to the traffic and the council's waste department, or perhaps it found someone who gave it nicer dog food.

Edie did not much like dogs. She got a kitten, a scrap of a thing that came and went from Lewis's lap without him noticing. He let it out of the house too soon and they never saw it again.

He opens up the fridge to take a look at what Ruth has left him. She comes every morning, on her way to work. She does administrative work for an arts organisation that has no theatre, no art gallery, not even a café; it is just an office and he does not really know what she does there. Whatever it is, she has been doing it for twenty years. She comes here – letting herself in with her own door key – at the same time every morning. She makes him a cup of her milky tea and leaves a Tupperware tub of soup in the fridge for his dinner. She makes these soups herself, with leftovers, all the vegetables her little boy won't eat. The soups are grey-brown, the same colour as Ruth's hair.

There is not much else in the fridge. There is a supermarket in the village, on Small Street, just past the secondary school. It is a perfectly good supermarket and within walking distance but he does not go there. When he was still driving, he once parked for more than the permitted two hours in the car park of this supermarket. A few weeks later, he received a letter stamped with the scales of justice, citing video evidence of his infringement of the rules and fining him heavily. He paid the fine but has not been back to the store since, even though it is the only one that he can get to now. Ruth thinks he is staging a boycott, being stubborn, but really he is just too embarrassed to return to the scene of the crime.

What Lewis really wants is one of Edie's steak and kidney puddings, her chicken curry, her hotpot. He wants that excellent beef Wellington he had in a restaurant once. He does not remember what restaurant it was, somewhere on a summer holiday perhaps. It was a long time ago. He does not want soup but Ruth brings it anyway and Lewis eats it. He hates to waste it, and hates to see her taking away, with the slightest of comments, his tub of uneaten soup. More often than not he eats it cold, straight from the fridge, minutes before she arrives to take away the empty tub and leave him with another. He prefers pizza. He has discovered the joys of pizza delivery services. He orders Supremes and Delights and they are brought to his door by young men on motorbikes.

He once wondered about getting a motorbike.

Closing the fridge, he looks at the calendar on the wall beside it. Every square is blank except for one, and that one, he realises, looking at the day, at the date, is today. It says:
3 pm.
But what, he wonders, is happening today at 3 pm? What else was he supposed to write before he got distracted, by a thought or the doorbell or a cat scratching in the garden? He has no idea if someone is coming or if he is supposed to be somewhere. No one ever comes except for Ruth, and there is nowhere he goes to other than the nursing home and the church on Sundays, and the pub, sometimes, for a shandy and a speciality sausage. He feels a flutter of excitement in his stomach at the thought that something out of the ordinary might be going to happen to him today.

3

When he was a child, he wanted to go to the moon

I
N A PHOTOGRAPH
on his living room mantelpiece, ­Lewis is four years old and riding his mother's tea tray down an icy slope with an almighty grin on his face. He imagines his nose and cheeks pinked by the cold air, although the camera has made them grey. It makes Ruth anxious, this picture; it worries her to see him hurtling down, as if he might still come to harm at the end of the slope, as if he could still break his bones.

Ruth was always a nervous girl, scared of many things – climbing a climbing frame in a playpark, climbing the ladder of a bunk bed, riding a bicycle or being on roller skates, being alone in the dark. Lewis could not stand it, that she did not have guts. He wanted a fearless child. Instead he had a girl who always wanted her mother. He wanted a boy, but he and Edie had left it too late and only had the one child. Perhaps nowadays it would be different, there would be things they could do; they store embryos in freezers, although some fail to survive the freezing, or they explode when thawed. He thinks of Walt Disney, cryonically frozen, to be thawed out in a distant future, although apparently this never happened.

When Lewis was a child, he liked to climb. He got up trees. He imagined being able to jump from up there, to spread his arms and will himself to fly. Instead, up in the branches, he read his comics and books:
The Brave Book for Boys
and
The Schoolboy's Annual: Tales of Sport and Adventure
– hard-covered hand-me-downs, one bright yellow and one with bombers on the front. Lewis, whose name meant ‘famous warrior', wanted to be the boys in these stories, to have their adventures at sea and up mountains, their encounters with smugglers and bears, their golden age of boyhood; he wanted to at least have their dogs. Above all, the character he most wanted to be was Flash Gordon. He wanted to have Flash Gordon's bravado and Flash Gordon's torso, to travel in a rocket ship, to travel in a starship that was faster than light.

His mother did not like him being up in trees. She worried that he would get stuck up there in a storm and then he might get hit by lightning. He never was up a tree, though, during a storm. Once or twice, he was outside when he heard thunder, and he stood still, holding his breath, but he never did get struck by a bolt of high-voltage electricity.

They lived in a different part of the village then. They lived on Small Street, near the secondary school. He can see the very spot from the back bedroom of the house he lives in now. For a time, in this house on Small Street, they lived next door to relatives – his father's uncle, who moved away when Lewis was young, and his father's cousin, whom Lewis does not even remember.

Lewis's back bedroom window is also where he and Edie had stood watching for the Perseid meteor shower. He had thrown the window open to let the night air in, imagining explosions like fireworks. The trails of light were infrequent, though, and hard, in fact, to see at all, and silent. Edie referred to them later, to Ruth, as shooting stars, but they were not stars, as Lewis had been disappointed to discover; they were particles like dust, burning up in Earth's atmosphere. The comet from which the particles came was long gone and would not be back for something like a hundred and fifteen years. Lewis wonders if Ruth's boy will live to see it. Probably not, he thinks.

Lewis has always lived near the countryside. Even when he went away to university and might have gone to a city, he went instead to a plate glass university on the edge of a town, surrounded by countryside. Decades later, hearing stories about this university's liberalism and radicalism, Lewis's father eyed him suspiciously, wondering what he'd been doing down there – he used the word ‘hotbed' – and Lewis had to say, ‘It wasn't like that when I was there.' It's a city now, apparently, although he hasn't been back.

The best countryside around here is out near the smaller villages, the smallest of which is known by its prefix, ‘Nether'. His father took him rambling, looking for ‘God's wonders', warning him about adders and hemlock. They picked great bunches of wild flowers and captured insects and small mammals in jars with tiny holes punched through the lid.

Lewis took eggs, once, from a bird's nest, from the nest of the handsome yellow bunting, the yellowhammer. He loved the brightness of the yellow on the throat and belly of the male; the female was duller. The yellow was brightest of all in the older males. He had one of the eggs in his pocket and one in each hand when his father saw what he was up to and told him to put them back. And Lewis did put them back, even the one he had in his pocket, but as they walked on, his father said to him, ‘The mother will probably reject them now.' Lewis, lying in bed that night, worried about these eggs and whether they really would be rejected by the mother bird, even though he had only touched them.

At school, there was an art teacher who walked around the dinner hall saying to one pupil, ‘Your mother loves you,' and to another, ‘Your mother doesn't love you,' as if he alone knew, or as if, by saying it, he made it so. Either way, if he came to a stop behind you, leaned over your red-jumpered shoulder and said, ‘Your mother doesn't love you,' as he did one day to Lewis, who had until that moment been loved, you knew suddenly, certainly, with disappointment, in silent agony with your mouth still full of tomato-damp sandwich, that it was true, that something you had done, or something about you, had negated that vital love.

You don't see yellow buntings these days. What he remembers of the yellow bunting, aside from its yellow underparts and the abandoned eggs, are his father's demonstrations of the bird's song. ‘Tit, tit, tit, tit, tit, tit,
tee
,' he chanted as they walked along, ‘tit, tit, tit, tit, tit, tit,
tee
.' Lewis, staring at the ground, concentrating on snakes, found it alarming. Years later, when Lewis was eighteen or nineteen, he saw his father with
The Trial of Lady Chatterley
in his hands, breaking the book open and reading aloud, ‘The word “fuck” or “fucking” occurs no less than thirty times. I have added them up . . . “Cunt” fourteen times; “balls” thirteen times; “shit” and “arse” six times apiece.' The unsettling effect of witnessing this language coming from his father's mouth was much the same as hearing his attempt at the yellow bunting's song.

They would come home from their rambles and cover the kitchen table with fistfuls of wilting wild flowers and jars containing creatures that Lewis always hoped – when they looked through his father's books – would prove to be something rare, but he was always disappointed. They once caught a snake but it was only a grass snake. He wanted to go to the jungle. He wanted to travel to the North Pole. He wanted to fly to the moon. (He wanted, really, to visit the sun but that was further away, and if you made it that far you'd get burnt and you'd never come back.)

Lewis grew up to become an RE teacher at the local secondary school, the same school he had attended as a boy and at which his father taught English. (The art teacher was still there, and Lewis saw him in the dinner hall saying to the pupils who had brown-bread sandwiches, ‘Your mother loves you,' and to those with white-bread sandwiches, ‘Your mother doesn't love you.') Lewis and his father, each a Mr Sullivan, were often confused in paperwork, ‘Mr Sullivan' being taken to mean his father, Lawrence. In later decades, when Lawrence was no longer teaching there, Lewis ceased to be a Mr Sullivan at all and instead the children called him by his first name as if he were one of them. He had never liked being Lewis Sullivan because of the way the consonants ran together in the middle so that his edges disappeared.

As a young man, Lewis, daydreaming about his future, had pictured himself visiting his elderly mother in a bungalow. He imagined doing her shopping for her, putting up shelves, fetching things down from her loft. Instead, as it turned out, it was his father who remained in old age, whose shopping Lewis did and whose shelves Lewis put up, whose roof Lewis still lived under. On a few occasions, Lewis brought a male colleague – the art teacher, the chemistry teacher, a physical fitness instructor – round for dinner, but Lawrence was not the best host. ‘Don't they have wives?' he would say of these men. ‘Don't any of them have wives to get home to?'

When the school recruited a new librarian who was a single lady of Lewis's age, Lewis became a big reader of whatever classics the library carried. As he returned each of these books at the end of the loan period, he attempted to discuss them with her, but each time, Edie, eyeing the Austen, the Eliot, the Woolf, would say, ‘I haven't read it. It's not my sort of thing.'

On their first date, they did not talk about books; they talked about food, what they had or had not eaten in their lives. ‘I've never had beef Wellington,' said Edie. ‘I've never had black pudding,' said Lewis.

When Lewis and Edie had been courting for a year, Lewis's father asked if he planned to marry Edie. He asked again, many times, over the years, saying to Lewis, ‘What are you waiting for?' They had been a couple for seven years before Lewis finally got around to proposing. After a three-year engagement, they married in the summer of 1977.

On his wedding day, Lewis was driven to the church by Edie's brother, who was his best man. En route, in a quiet side road still hung with decorations from the silver jubilee, they came across an old, yellow car that had come to a stop, its hazard lights flashing. ‘We'd better go around it,' said Lewis. As they drew alongside it, Lewis noticed the hula girl on the dashboard, ready to dance but still for now. The driver was sitting on the bonnet, reclining against the windscreen, sunbathing with his long legs out in front of him, one knee raised up. He had his shirt off. There was music coming from the car's stereo and the man was drumming his hands against the bonnet while the bunting fluttered above him, like someone on a float at a parade. They paused at the junction, and Edie's brother, glancing in the rearview mirror, said that they ought to go back and see if they could help. Lewis was looking in his wing mirror. ‘We haven't got time to go back,' he said. ‘I don't want to get my suit dirty. He looks like he's waiting for someone.' He opened his mouth to say something else, to say, ‘I don't know,' but Edie's brother was already pulling out of the junction, pressing on in the direction of the church.

At the wedding, Edie's brother made a joke in his best man's speech about this half-naked man atop a broken-down car, and Lewis and Edie slow-danced to ‘Everything I Own', a song that was forever afterwards on the radio, someone new recording it every few years. Lewis never mentioned to Edie that it was not really the romantic song she thought it was but a tribute to the songwriter's dead father, a love song for an old man.

When their baby came along, she was a biter. Edie bit the baby right back to teach her not to do it, but when the baby bit Lewis he just looked pained and that made Ruth laugh, displaying her sharp little teeth. ‘You must bite her,' said Edie, but he could not bring himself to do it, and soon the moment had passed, it seemed to him, although Edie came over and bit her anyway. The baby screamed, and she screamed in the night, wanting Edie, who sometimes went to her and sometimes did not. (Lewis, conversely, had become quiet in bed. Every Friday, he put a pillow in between their headboard and the partition wall, and came without making a sound.)

When Ruth reached the age at which some little girls want to marry their fathers, she chose her grandfather, although he did not like the game. When she told Lawrence that she wanted to marry him, he ignored her, or he found some reason to leave the room.

In her teens, Ruth seemed interested only in pop stars and film stars who were either very old or dead. She never seemed to have a real boyfriend. One summer, during a family holiday at Butlins, she developed a crush on the ageing cabaret star. When they got home, she ran away, heading back to Bognor Regis to be with him. She was home again a week later and never mentioned him again. When, in her thirties, she married John, Lewis thought it might be a similar whim and has been waiting for it to pass, even though she was pregnant not long afterwards and that was years ago. Lewis does not find it easy to accept their dinner invitations but he adores the child. He had been expecting another girl, but it turned out to be a boy, the boy that he and Edie never had.

Lewis has tried to give the boy what his own father gave to him. He has attempted rambles. The boy walks along holding on to his toy binoculars through which one can look and see everything far less clearly than before. Like Ruth, though, the boy is anxious. Hoping to toughen him up, Lewis has instead given the boy a fear of bulls. Trying to capture a newt in a jar, Lewis trod on the creature, bursting its bright yellow belly, while the boy stood watching. To teach him how to climb a tree, Lewis helped the boy into the lower branches of one, and then got them both up onto the next branch and then the next, lifting and climbing, lifting and climbing, branch by branch without stopping to look down, until they were just about as high as they could go and they perched there, feeling proud of themselves, watching the insects that crawled along the ridges and valleys of the bark. It was only when the boy said that he wanted to get down again and Lewis had to contemplate the descent, that he realised the difficulty of it, of getting both himself and the boy safely down to the ground. He kept them up there for as long as he could before painstakingly bringing the boy down, scraping the skin from his limbs and afraid, the whole time, of plummeting. Like Ruth, the boy has a poor sense of balance. ‘Did you not think,' said Ruth, later, inspecting the boy's wounds, his sprained ankle, ‘about what you would do when you got up there? Did you think you could just stay there, the two of you, all night, or for ever?' When the boy hurts himself, he cries as if he might never stop. On another occasion, when Lewis returned the boy to his mother with a toenail split down the middle, Ruth said to Lewis, as if he knew nothing about children, as if he had none of his own, ‘Children his age have a fear of being damaged.'