Serious Sweet (9 page)

Amazing that someone so shallow can be so full of shit.

‘Jon.' Findlater fired off the kind of smile that chaps of libidinous capacities send each other as a confirmation of shared pursuits. He made one feel smeared with something. ‘Jon, how are you? How's the photography?'

‘It's … I'm in two minds.'

That's almost always true.

‘Well, if you get any good results, please do … Art photographs … Yes? I suppose digital won't give you the quality? And anyway, you'd want to develop them yourself. You are an old-school man, aren't you?' Another contagion-bearing grin.

Old school in the sense of old-fashioned. In the sense of who-knows-what imagined scenarios. Not in the sense of ties. That's ties in the sense of collars and colours and not in the sense of cats. Christ, I have a headache. When did that happen?

Jon had no interest in photography, but had once bought a drying frame for his post-marital flat in his lunch hour. This was intended to help him escape from complete reliance on a laundry
service or, worse still, a launderette. It would mean that he could, as his mother would have put it,
rinse out his smalls
and leave them to dry on the frame thereafter. He didn't want the care of his underwear to involve anybody else. He didn't even have a cleaning woman – why should he? He wasn't a messy man, he was self-contained. Findlater had misunderstood the frame, caught sight of it as it lounged in a corner, waiting to be taken out to the Junction and the penitential but convenient one-bedroom hutch where Jon now stored himself in workless moments.

Findlater, ever curious in unconstructive directions, had eyed the frame like a barn owl eyeing a mouse. ‘What's that, by the way?'

‘Drying frame. Our breakdown should be ready by Thursday at the latest. And if yours is ready then, too, we'll be ahead of the game.'

‘Good, good. Drying frame, eh …?' Findlater had manufactured a louche pause. The man was helplessly married, but enjoyed being discontented, liked the idea of straying while lacking the spine required to try it. He had a habit of driving up round Acton for a not good reason.

He told me once that Acton was the place for sighting Japanese schoolgirls. ‘You see them in flocks up there. And they look … exactly like Japanese schoolgirls.'The man's expression one of mingled fear and rapture. The Japanese Ministry of Education does run a school in Acton. It does that in order to aid the Japanese community – rather than with any hopes of aiding Findlater's masturbatory fantasies.

And I am sure that Japanese schoolgirls do look exactly like Japanese schoolgirls.

Christ, the poisonous waters that gather in the shallows of the masculine heart.

Do people expect that of me? Do they assume I am always panting inwardly for this or that of women, semi-hard thinking set on a constant alert? Are there confidential evaluations that are certain my primary focus is elsewhere?

If Findlater were genuinely predatory then Jon would have taken pains to do something about him, put a word
in – several – called the bloody Met on him, made sure of him, stamped him out, but the man was just pitiable.

It takes one differently pitiable man to know another.

I am, at least, not a lonely husband, hunched in a damp car pretending to read the paper, palms in a sweat, or loitering over authentic bento snacks in some Actonese café, hoping for a glimpse of kilts and knee socks, coy laughter, whatever fantasy sustains him through evenings with Mrs Nancy Findlater and her withered Elizabeth David cuisine, Hampstead Bazaar tunics and boxed sets of
The Good Life
and
To the Manor Born.

The lift's upward progress seemed cluttered and languid to an unreasonable degree and Jon reflected again that he should really try the trick of pressing the
DOOR OPEN
button along with his floor of choice in order to whisk himself aloft without stopping.

Or else you're meant to hold and press
DOOR CLOSE
. I've heard both offered as short cuts – tiny opportunities to practise selfishness. And the efficacy of the procedure is possibly a myth – like the idea that hitting the button at a pedestrian crossing will make the traffic stop. In a statistically significant number of cases the button is only provided to placate and has no effect. Quite often, your one accessible response to a situation is engineered to simply occupy your time while you wait for what was always going to happen anyway. It's an enforced displacement activity.

Like voting.

Jon realised that he hadn't spoken for a while and that Findlater had become unpalatably expectant.

Just as he had when he saw the drying frame. ‘A drying frame …'

‘It's a drying frame, yes. I need one. Now that I'm settled in.'

The horror of genuinely leaving a wife had scampered across behind Findlater's expression and was then replaced by a cut-price sort of glee. ‘Photography?'

‘No.'

‘Photography. To dry the prints.'

‘Not photography.'

‘I wouldn't have thought it of you.'

‘I'm not asking you to think it of me. Thinking it of me would be inaccurate.'

But people love to be inaccurate.

Which is why people like me are required. I am pathologically precise and therefore useful. I ought to be seen as useful.

Jon counted off the floors and sent thoughts in the direction of the fellow-travellers who had diluted the awfulness of Findlater:
goodbye, man with water-blemished shoes – goodbye, Palmer, I like you – and goodbye, the woman with the highlighted hair whom I don't know but see around – goodbye, man with two sticks – goodbye, woman who is markedly overweight and limps, perhaps as a result, or else who cannot exercise because of her limp and is therefore overweight, one shouldn't judge, but she is really fat – oh, and goodbye Findlater. Yes, Findlater, go, yes. Just leave me be, OK, with one last grin and …

‘I'll see you then, Jon.'

‘Yes, yes. You will. You will.'

Do I echo because I am hollow, or because I am a captive animal under stress and reassured by repetitions?

And then he was alone. Ascending.

So why does this all seem to be a fall?

A girl is balanced on her mother's shoulders, being gently bounced but also held secure. She is laughing. Her father is there also, strolling along, and an older brother who holds their dad's hand. The boy is not of an age to find that burdensome and swings their shared grip contentedly. They are walking west together along the King's Road on a mild autumn day which has been rainy but is now fine and therefore shining, dazzling: azure overhead and sparks underfoot. The family all have the same pleasantly dishevelled corn-coloured hair and a harmonised sense of taste. They look like artist adults of various sizes, people of comfortable wealth but with an access to imagination. Their summer has left them tanned, lean, unified. Everyone's shoes are supportive without being ugly, unusual without being garish. Nothing is home-made but it could be, it could come from a home in the 1930s with lots of leisure and access to quality materials and craft skills.

The daughter on high is wriggling with happiness and twisting round to see where her grandmother – the woman is surely her grandmother – is following along behind: another lanky, graceful, contented shape, corn-and-grey hair swept up in a stylishly untidy bun. The grandmother is talking into a banana, holding it like a telephone receiver of an old-fashioned kind the girl has probably never seen. The woman is nodding and chatting with complete conviction into this piece of fruit and the granddaughter is finding this hilarious, but also not right. It is not accurate in a way which seems to worry her profoundly. There is something impermissible about such a thing taking place. If this can happen, what else could suddenly be real, although this is not real, although it appears to be, although this is not?

The girl giggles and frowns and shakes her head and points waggingly at the phone which is not a phone and her mother reaches up to stroke her, soothe her daughter, who keeps on laughing, frowning, laughing. The daughter also shouts, over and over, ‘Make it stop. Make it stop. Make it stop.'

JON DIDN'T REFLECT
upon this – genuinely did not – but he'd obviously made a gross error. Under pressure from several quarters he had acted in a manner that invited unintended consequences – not all of them good – and this was unpardonable, but any regrets at this juncture would simply compound the error with a waste of effort.

He'd screwed up.

He'd done so in an attempt, he supposed, to avoid screwing up.

Bespoke service: letters handwritten.

He'd still been with Valerie when he drafted the first advertisement.

Heartfelt.

That was cut immediately. He'd never wanted to feel a thing, especially not there. He needed to be businesslike and light.

Letters handwritten to female requirements.

Sounded sexist. And overly sexual. He wasn't volunteering himself to write porn. Erotica. That was the term now, wasn't it? For non-pictorial thrills. Ones that don't insist anybody should be employed in a horrible job.

How men can watch that stuff … to look … to forget the performers …

And I wouldn't be a literary performer.

And not erotica, either. I can't write that. That's another horrible job and I do not wish to do it. I couldn't. I can't.

And erotica, they could get that anywhere. Christ knew, Valerie had a whole shelf of the nonsense: her not-quite-joke at his expense. He had read it. Slightly. Strange that she might be stimulated by considering so many things that she would loathe to do in life. Pain and unfairness as agents of arousal.

If that were true, naturally, I'd have been priapic for decades and I haven't and I'm not, I'm not, not this monster of the kind we're meant to be – rape threats as idle chatter and demanding every woman should be nude and pretending we have to be scoundrels as a matter of course. That isn't what a man should be.

I check online, Out There, because it's wise to keep informed and why not take an interest in the generations who may be paying for my palliative care – should the need arise. I listen. I am rendered unhappy by what I see and hear.

Letters handwritten to your requirements.

Which couldn't work, either – he'd known the ad would have to be gender specific. Jon had no interest in writing for men. He'd been selfish in that regard. In all of it, really. His pleasing others was not altruistic, it was a means to an end.

Wanted: Woman to whom a man can be anonymously nice. Opportunity for same unavailable to him in current circumstances.

It was worse than adultery, admitting that you couldn't like or be pleasant to your partner and had forgotten if the problem started with your own distrust or theirs. A betrayer can distrust – a betrayer, of all people, would know they should.

Letters handwritten to the discerning lady's requirements.

That had seemed potentially patronising and archaic – plus, it was likely to attract the type of women he wouldn't warm to and he'd hoped there could be a degree of warmth.

Letters handwritten to the discerning woman's requirements.

Which might seem ridiculous, or amusing, and those who found it amusing and even replied in kind might be the ones he wanted.

If he wasn't, instead, simply swamped by the pompously lovelorn.

So he'd qualified the thing with more information. Factual.

Expressions of affection and respect delivered weekly.

He thought he could manage weekly and it would be good to establish that as a ground rule – no escalation and yet also no dwindling away.

No replies necessary.

This was intended to imply an interaction which was at arm's length.

Although it would also suggest that I'm satisfied with nothing, with throwing myself down a well over and over and hearing my echoes, inside and out.

Terms on application to Corwynn August.

That bit was easy – he was born in August and his middle name was Corwynn. He'd never been that fond of Jonathan, it took too long. And Jon, rather than John, was unavoidably pretentious.

And Jon Sigurdsson … Well, Jesus Christ.

J.C. Sigurdsson having ridiculous echoes in that direction also. Valerie always enjoyed them – even threw a couple of nails at me once, as close as she ever came to DIY: ‘Get back up on your cross then, you bastard.'

He'd picked them both up and held them and not said, ‘I'd need three.' Another moment to recall that not everyone loves accuracy.

Not everyone loves. Not everyone wants to.

But this would be possible, it could be, this writing thing.

So.

Bespoke service: letters handwritten to the discerning woman's requirements. Expressions of affection and respect delivered weekly. No replies necessary. Terms on application to Corwynn August.

And he'd added the address of a Mayfair PO box he'd rented, the box number given as that of an apartment to add obfuscation.
The whole effort had amounted to thirty-three words in the end, which one wouldn't have thought would be the equivalent of high explosive.

Not that it detonated right away. He had been careful. His first trial ran out across Ohio through classified ads in a number of affiliated papers.

I believed that I was picking Ohio at random: far enough away, English-speaking and yet offering variations … On reflection, I was remembering a bungled Ohio execution – lethal injection. For some reason it stayed in my mind: a Department of Rehabilitation and Correction taking almost half an hour to chemically asphyxiate a man. Thirty minutes of smothering to death.

The name of one's department either outlines your agenda and ethos, or acts as a permanent reproach. My department has changed its name three times since I joined it. This bespeaks unease, if not confusion, if not a prolonged divergence of intentions from reality. This bespeaks an oncoming tumble.

Despite its associations with Distasteful Death, Ohio had still been a reasonable choice for his pilot study. And there was no cause for alarm if – or rather when – correspondents seemed unsuitable. He had replied to them politely, pleading lack of capacity, the emotional requirements of the task, fatigue, and had then ignored any subsequent communications. That worked. That worked 100 per cent of the time.

It all worked.

Because Jon did get replies. There were people – women, he believed they were women – who still wanted delay to be part of a conversation, who wanted to hold paper held by other fingers first, who wanted more than packets of data firing intangibly about in a blizzard of sales pitches and perversions and gossip and cruelty and largely imbecilic surveillance and planned indiscretions.

Jon provided each woman with twelve letters, unique artefacts, unrepeatable – seen only by him and by her. That old-fashioned kind of security. That old-fashioned kind of anonymity.

And it all granted him the baffling realisation that, for some, England was a land expected to supply delicacy and style,
gentlemanly ardour. Crisp sheets and clean cuffs and the movements of cloth against cloth against skin, gracious, permitting, trusted and fragile.

And old-fashioned. Old school.

That I specialise so easily in being an anachronism could start making me feel decrepit.

Bizarre. It's all bizarre.

I'm not even English. I pass. It's easy to pass.

But I wrote letters for each stranger and hoped to catch her at the brink of foreplay so that I could be there, too. Or somewhere like it. Permanently arrested passion in Zanesville and Akron – and twice in Columbus and once in South Euclid.

And much the same for me – in London.

So terribly unwise.

He'd settled on those five women. He'd tried his best.

And I nearly gave up before I unleashed the whole mess. It took me three weeks to hammer out the opening attempt. So much stored-away softness that I thought I'd have on tap, I thought I'd finally be able … but I wasn't.

My dear, my dearest, my darling, sweetheart.
Love's words are the weariest, nothing but stale.

One woman asked me to call her Slim and requested descriptions of holidays we hadn't taken, and never would, near English landmarks. She helped, because she wasn't demanding or off colour. She presented herself as real to me and was generous and therefore made my letters real enough to work.

Always the women.

I invented a trip for us that involved a high tea more perfect than ever there has been, the scone-laden event taking place within a stone's throw – not that one should – of Windsor Castle. And then there was stroking her cheek on the train while mild green acres licked our windows, showed no blemish – trees straight out of Constable with broad shade and dozing sheep, a lake not so blue as her eyes.

Eye colour is important. They don't have to send a photo – and if they do I only have their word for it that the picture is of them. They can be who they like for me, without me. But eye colour, there's something true about that, whether they're lying or not. Mentioning it means we can face each other and earnestly enquire.

Which I thought was a good and necessary thing when I began.

I think Woman 4 was elderly. She called herself Nora and posted me a black-and-white baby photo of a small blurred form with a quizzical bonnet thing on its head. And a list of outdated movie stars she'd admired. I enjoyed her. I pretended that her husband had died in the war – or
a
war – and that she was used to and deserving of a romance she could hold on paper. Love letters to tie with a ribbon and keep. I ignored the signals under her replies that she was married to someone retired and angry who was an ugliness in her house.

Once he'd overcome his stage fright, Jon had sent twelve letters each, in pretty much exactly twelve weeks, to five experimental subjects and nothing untoward had happened.

I was listed under Trades and Services.

The box had filled with long and narrow envelopes of the American type. He had winnowed. He had decided. Then he had written. And then he had checked the box rather keenly for replies, anticipating requests for this, that and no other. And he found them. Along with later modifications required from his content and style, which he did respond to within reason. There were also – he should have guessed – mirroring offers of regard and deliveries of tenderness. It was faking, but beautiful faking – certainly faking on his part – all unburdened by concerns for any future.

Inked out between two countries, he was faking satisfactory affection.

By the end of the eighth or ninth week of that initial trial, there was what he might have termed an easing between his shoulders and across his chest and a growing sensation of usefulness. And when his hands touched his wife – muzzy under the quilt at late hours – when he touched her … when he touched Valerie, something about him must have changed, because she let him, he was allowed. A kiss or a caress in passing while they used their separate bathroom sinks – were busy with preparing – this didn't become commonplace, but it also didn't inevitably emerge as a failed apology on his part, or the start of an argument.

A sign that you're over, a couple's inability to use the same bathroom sink. One could see it in the plumber's face as he fitted the side-by-sides.

And Valerie would reach for Jon. She would glance at him and pause and be puzzled. ‘Have you changed from that dreadful barber?'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘Don't apologise. But he was a dreadful barber.'

Jon had his hair cut by a slightly secretive gentleman from Guanxian, now resident in Marylebone. The man did a good job and was incredibly cheap. Valerie had liked the idea of Mr Lam's reclusive habits – they ensured his exclusivity – but she had been repelled by his inadequate charges.

‘I don't know why you ever used him.' She had been spooning at the marmalade, but had stopped, which was unfortunate because he wanted it. Her undecided hand, the clotted spoon, they put things stickily in limbo.

Jon had adjusted his glasses in the way that one does when one would prefer the world to be more bearable, ‘I wasn't … What? I wasn't apologising, I was saying sorry because I didn't hear you.'

‘I
said
 …' She'd been facing Jon across the breakfast table, setting down her piece of partly marmaladed toast as if it were a token of love from some diseased former suitor. ‘… I said have you got a new barber?'

‘No.'

‘You look different.'

‘I'm not different.'

‘You look it.'

‘But I'm not. I haven't even had a haircut from my old barber. I'm the same.'

Valerie had studied him for a moment and then given him his first sight of an expression with which he was now very familiar.

The complicit stare that tells you – I know what you're up to and you haven't got away with it.

Because he
was
different, he did look it and his difference was beginning to show.

It was predictable that he couldn't spend lunch hours and early starts and extra-late finishes being sweet, just sweet, only that, across paper – to Slim and Patty and Nora and Robyn and Clare – without changing.

This feeling … a definite emotion … not specific, but definitely … this constant … ever since …

And there came, of course, a morning when he'd woken and his reach had been already anxious and seeking and then holding tight around his wife – his wife, for Christ's sake – hard against her and a mew of insistence, growl, groan, some kind of noise he was making while his face searched in at her neck and his legs moved under, over, clasping, and there was no objection.