Inglorious (11 page)

She thought she might clean the kitchen, but instead she made another call. After a few rings Kersti answered. Kersti was definitely becoming waspish. Here they were, this afternoon, this day fleeting softly towards evening, and Rosa said, ‘Hello, Kersti, it’s Rosa’ and there was no reply. No trace of friendly recognition at all! That sounded bad, so Rosa, nervous and picking up speed, said, ‘Hi, Kersti, sorry to bother you, it’s Rosa.’

‘Yes, Rosa, what?’

‘Hoping you have worked a miracle of legalese.’

‘Don’t you know it’s Monday?’

‘Monday? What happens on Monday?’

‘Monday is my worst day.’

‘Should I perhaps call later?’

‘I haven’t been in touch with Liam,’ said Kersti. ‘I’ll let you know when I do.’

‘Look, Kersti, I know you’re very busy. It’s very kind of you to help. I know it seems stupid, trivial, to be quibbling about a tacky sofa and some chairs, a second-hand bed, the rest. But my credit card is about to explode in a ball of fire, so satanic is the interest. And then there’s the overdraft, you know, it’s dull but it would really help,’ she said. ‘The furniture would help. If Liam would only do the decent thing, sell it, give me my half.’

‘You see, Rosa, the rest of us prefer to have a JOB,’ Kersti said, repeating the refrain. Everyone hymned it in a different way, but they all hymned it the same. It reminded her of a song someone sang when she was young.
You got to have a J O B if
you wanna be with me.
Anything would be better, Kersti was saying, than ringing around begging her ex-boyfriend to sell her furniture. Almost anything would be more dignified.

‘A lot isn’t,’ said Rosa. ‘Believe me, I’ve had a look. A lot out there isn’t dignified at all.’ And after dignity, there was the getting up, getting there on time, sitting yourself down, the rest.

‘Rosa, I have to go,’ sighed Kersti.

‘It’s not lassitude that stops me.’

‘Rosa, I’m going now. Talk to the bank.’

‘The bank is proving intractable.’

Kersti said, ‘Yes, tell him to come in. OK, Rosa, time’s up. I’ll have another go soon, OK. Now Mr Wharton is waiting.’

‘I do understand, absolutely. I agree, you must get on. If you could call Liam, that would be great. But I’ll understand if you’re too busy.’

‘Yes, thanks for your call. I’ll get back to you soon,’ said Kersti, because Mr Wharton had just come in.

‘Well, it’s very kind of you. I am very grateful,’ said Rosa.

She had phoned a few too many times already. Really, it was sketchy of Liam. He was holding onto the stuff, waiting for her to succumb to madness or to marry rich. She couldn’t think why else he was delaying. Negotiations had stalled. The furniture was still in his flat. The bank sharks were getting vicious, showing a distinct sense of purpose. They really wanted the money back. Or her head on a platter. Now it was just Rosa and Kersti, trading barbs. Kersti smiling through her deep sense of frustration.

‘OK, Mrs Middleton, I’ll speak to you soon,’ said Kersti.

Then the line went dead, leaving her standing with a rictus grin and a receiver pressed superfluously to her face.
Tabula
rasa
, she thought.
Hardly possible at all.

Now she heard the dry speech of the commentator, releasing the latest.
Today the war continued. The police caught a man trying
to board a train with a bomb. The prime minister announced
that global warming is a serious threat, perhaps the most serious
our civilisation has faced. Interest rates went up. The archbishop
said that abortion laws should be revised. England lost at sport.
And, breaking news, Rosa Lane distinctly failed to pass the
guardians of the gate and unearth the thing that lies within. Yes,
that’s right, initial reports are confirming that Rosa Lane – thirty-
five and quite a lot, creeping towards the end that awaits us
all – is still steadfastly failing to cast off the manacles, mind-forged or otherwise – and gain the pearl beyond price! We’ll be
following that story through the evening but now let’s go back
to the war.
The clock in the corner was like a metronome. It steadied her nerves. She found some pieces of paper on Jess’s desk, and a black fountain pen in a silver box. She sat down to write. She wrote to her father, telling him not to worry. Things were fine. The furniture was well in hand.
The furniture is definitely going to come good. The cash is mine, daddy, all mine.

She wrote to Liam.
Dear Liam, Please can you sell the furniture.
I need my half. Or could you buy your half from me? It
is quite urgent. Thanks, Rosa.

She wrote:
Dear Mr Martin White, I have never written for
your publication. I wrote for years for the Daily Rag. I was a
mediocre but fairly successful journalist. I wondered if you
might be interested in a few ideas I have. An article perhaps
about graffiti and its significance, the mythic suggestiveness it
contains? I promise you, there is ancient lore being spelt out
on the streets, prophecies of the future. I can’t unravel them,
but I can see they are there. Or, perhaps, a piece about elective
destitution – an inexcusable squandering of one’s job and
training, a burgeoning refusenik cultural movement?
That was Rosa, she knew no others.
Devastating to those who have
struggled to support you. Clearly ungrateful. Prompted by
something difficult to treat, apparently, some lurking sense of
WHY BOTHER? I have many more ideas, and look forward
to talking to you. Yours ever, Rosa Lane.

Then she wrote:
Plot scenario. Rosa Lane is saved. Flights of
angels sing her to her supper. She is carted away from the
weariness, the fever and the fret. Ahem.
She meant Amen, but it was so long since she had written the word she had forgotten how to spell it.

‘Oh God,’ she said to the room. She tore up the piece of paper and dropped it on the floor. Then she wrote:
We live in
the conviction that we are masters of our lives, that life is given
to us for our enjoyment. But this is obviously absurd. Surely
we can be happy in the knowledge of our mortality? Surely we
must be? There is no eternal substance in the universe. Even
the stars are subject to flux. Even the sun must fade. If we look
around we understand that mutability is the inevitable state.
So why not a religion of the mutable, rather than the eternal?
Worshipping the ceaseless tendency of things to alter? This is
my philosophy
… She tore up that as well and threw the pieces away. She whistled guiltily and thought about giving Liam a friendly call. At least then she could wish him luck and check on the furniture. It seemed odd that he would marry so soon, but there was nothing she could do and she wanted him to know that she was glad, really, ultimately she was happy he was so well. He had jumped, head first, into the consoling barrel, the malmsey marriage butt. And here she was in the great loneliness, trying to keep her nose in the air. She aimed to smile, but found she couldn’t summon it. She was confused, thinking about food and money and the death of love. She found she remembered so many small things. Things of life. The almost invisible backdrop. Years flooding past her. Only a few years ago she had been young and it seemed like there was a lot of time. Doubtless she had wasted far too many days. Of course she had always surrendered hours to the simple business of stuffing her belly. But that was inevitable.
Eros agape
and amor,
she thought. Now she remembered an evening when she and Liam had sat together in a restaurant. She had it clear in her mind – both of them tired, in smart clothes, having come there straight from work. It seemed an age ago, an eon back, in a misty past when she was the suave owner of an array of A-lined skirts and smart jackets, and wore them elegantly, with a scarf around her neck. She tied her hair up, clipped it into a chignon. Then she and Liam looked well together, her clicking in high heels, and Liam in a sensible suit and a pastel-blue tie. Each of them with a glass, sure of themselves.

On their table was a flower standing in a slender vase. There
were photos on the walls, patched pictures of forgotten celebrities. The place was subdued, a little seedy, but the pasta was edible, caked in cream. They were both labouring over their plates. When they were no longer hungry, they fought half-heartedly about a crisis Liam was having at work. Liam was fighting a rearguard action against Rosa’s insistence, her pointed questions. She was asking him to try harder. ‘Go back and renegotiate,’ she was saying. ‘Tell them you won’t take it. Threaten to walk out.’

‘Impossible,’ he said. ‘I just don’t do things that way.’

‘Well, you have to. Otherwise you’ll never get anywhere. They’ll ignore you. The reason they treat you this way is because you never stand up for yourself. In this, you’re hopeless.’

‘Hopeless?’ He looked hurt.

‘Only in this. In this you are spineless. What would be so wrong about saying what you think?’

‘It’s more complicated than that,’ he said.

‘Well, what does that mean?’

It was ironic, how ambitious she had been for him. She jostled at him; she hardly ever praised him. That was her fault. Those evenings when she picked at him, explained what he was doing wrong, standing on the pedestal of her so-called career, she had slowly forced him into action. Liam was tortoise-brained, he liked to move to the slowest available timescale, but eventually she made him resolute. Bedding Grace was a
coup de théâtre.
Perhaps it was an act of revenge. That evening, she recalled, they had passed some hours discussing his latest small failure. Rosa was steely and certain of herself. At the end of the beating he picked up the bill. It didn’t help to pity him. Still, the hours they had passed discussing his job! Tearing him apart, mostly. Why did she care so much? She had been too engaged with it all; she had been too frantic. Evening after evening they had debated their small lives, writ them large together. And though she saw her enthusiasm – her concern for these elements – as
incomprehensible, quite inscrutable from her present state, it remained strange to her that it should be impossible to return to these evenings, that she would never sit again in a small Italian restaurant with Liam. At the time it had seemed ongoing, each evening part of a limitless series. Her relationship with Liam, because it had endured for so long, allowed her to develop an illusion that they – alone of everyone – might transcend the absolutes of space and time. Because they returned daily to the same point – the two of them, waking in bed together, in their familiar bedroom with the same sounds for each morning – it seemed as if this pattern would recur for ever, an eternal recurrence. Eventually she found this stifling, but for years it allowed her to evade reality, delude herself about the incessant passage of days. Because of this she had failed to notice many signs. In the last months they stopped eating out. It was all too pursed and formal. In public they were uneasy, suddenly aware of themselves, of the lies they were spinning.

There were days when she wondered if she had been profligate. If she had been idle, and inert, sluggish in love and then in saving herself. Perhaps she should have fought for him, challenged Grace to a duel. And that wasn’t such a bad idea, she thought. She would have liked the chance to blast a shot at Grace.
Pistols out. The foes, cold-blooded and unspeaking
each took four steps. The clock of destiny chimed, and the
poet, without a sound, dropped his pistol onto the earth.
Better to be Lensky, or Pushkin, blasted and shot to shreds, than no one at all. She always liked the absolute insanity of the duel, the loss of a sense of proportion inherent to the ritual. Grace would have tried to talk her way out of it. Laconically, she would have said, ‘Essentially, Rosa you are succumbing to an atavistic – and unfeminine – urge for violence. Why? Why suppress centuries of progress, because you are feeling upset?’ – but Rosa would have her pistol cocked already.

Sitting in the present, a cold wind swirling at the windows, Rosa wrote:
tat tvam asi. In another we recognise our true
being.
She screwed up the piece of paper and held it in her hand.
Bodhi
, or something like, the pure beauty of the bed, the origin of the world. The love grotto! The enchantment of the heart, a moment of perfect suspension, above the clashing forces of desire and loathing, a moment of beauty. Love as a casting off of the bonds of the ego. Supplying an instant of perfection, ecstasy in beholding the object of this pure and selfless love! A condition remote from the sneering final stages of her relationship with Liam, it had to be acknowledged.
Yet for a
few years, Liam was your god.
Now she heard the thrum of the rain. A sudden storm had begun. The sash windows rattled and she heard the softened sounds of tyres on the road. The clouds swirled.
Later there might be thunder,
she thought. Later there might be thunder, she wrote, and tore up the paper and threw the pieces into the toilet.

She felt sick, but that was because she had drunk too much tea. It was clear she had to get away, out of her head. Out of the city which had a dark cloud hanging above it, apprehension, fear perhaps. She perceived that the flat was small and the house was whirling in space.
We are all
, thought Rosa,
speeding through space, a velocity too wild to contemplate.
Of course her surroundings were significant, but they changed so quickly. Time’s winged whatsit, flapping at her back. These feuds, wars, everything spinning in emptiness. And Rosa as her own fleeting vantage point. Changing all the time, even as she tried to think of herself as the still centre. Even Whitchurch was spinning, turning swift circles. She could move as slowly as she liked, and she couldn’t change a thing. The earth wobbles on its axis and turns through the days and wanders round the sun. Everything is speed and light, and will be until the galaxy becomes static and dark. The Vedas talked of a pattern of dreams. Brahma dreamt of a serpent on a river, and on the serpent’s back was a tree, and each leaf of the tree was a dreamer, dreaming their own dream. Every few thousand years Brahma would awake, and a flower would appear from his navel and drift downstream. Or something like that.
Definitely a flower and a navel involved. She remembered a song her grandfather had sung her when she was a child.
Row
row row the boat gently down the stream, Merrily merrily
merrily merrily, life is but a dream.
It was a neat little Heraclitan ditty, and he had sung it as a lullaby. Hardly consoling, she thought. Even worse, life is but a dream of a dream, said the Vedas, a dreamer dreaming of others dreaming, more perplexing still. Indra’s net. You were netted at birth, confined and quite entangled. She didn’t trust much, except experience, her own small sense of things. In this she called herself Jamesian, though really she knew little of William James. Any number of labels would fit this feeling, she was sure. And her experience, though she perceived it as her own, her unique perspective on the world, was most likely collective; it seemed unlikely she was privy to any secrets.