The Essence of the Thing (11 page)

42

‘Just go straight inside, darling—no one’s there, Geoffrey’s taken Guy to his riding lesson—I’ll get the luggage.’

Nicola went into the sitting room and sat down on the sofa and buried her face—down which as soon as Susannah had opened the front door her tears had started to stream—her terrible, strange, stricken face, in her crossed arms, and wept. Here were all the tears she had not shed during this terrible week: all the tears, for all the horror which had come upon her, and which, unendurable as it was, had to be nonetheless experienced. Then Susannah was with her. She cried for a very long time; Susannah had never heard a sound so utterly bereft. At last her tears subsided and she looked up, her expression hopeless and beaten.

‘I think I might just pop over to Notting Hill and kill him now,’ said Susannah matter-of-factly. ‘Do you want to come with me, or would you rather wait here?’

Nicola tried to smile. ‘Hasn’t Geoffrey taken the car?’ she said.

‘Oh, yes, I was forgetting. We’ll have to wait until they get back. That won’t be for another hour or so. They might stay out for lunch. Well, we’ll have plenty of time to have a nice cup of tea first. And something to eat.’

‘Just tea,’ said Nicola. ‘I can’t eat anything.’

‘Just a slice of ham? Nice ham from the bone? On a very thin slice of bread? With the tiniest dab of mustard? And just one
weeny
leaf of cress? Just to please me.’

Nicola managed to laugh, and then tears started coming out of her eyes again. ‘What would I do without you,’ she said brokenly.

‘You’d have to kill him by yourself,’ said Susannah. ‘Which might be quite difficult.’

‘He’s probably not even there,’ said Nicola wanly. ‘He’s probably gone out.’

‘I hope he gets run over then,’ said Susannah.

Nicola imagined the scene, Jonathan lying in the street, as still as death, covered in blood, and began to weep again in earnest.

‘No,’ she cried, ‘don’t say that! I don’t want him to die!’

‘All right then,’ said Susannah. ‘All right, all right. We’ll let him live. But if he’s going to live, he’s going to have to shape up, he truly is.’

And she began to wonder just how Jonathan might really have been living and thinking, and feeling, for the relationship to have come to this, and she thought it might be a good idea to do something about lunch, because then Nicola might be able to talk about everything which had happened, and she might gain some true perception of this extraordinary and terrible situation.

‘It may be I who has to shape up,’ said Nicola miserably.

‘That remains to be seen,’ said Susannah. ‘The first thing to do is to have some tea and something to eat. Just a
tiny
snackette. Come on.’

And she took Nicola’s hand and they went into the kitchen.

43

So, she’s gone, thought Jonathan, she has actually gone. It’s all over; she’s gone. And the flat itself seemed, from the moment that the front door had closed behind her, to have stopped breathing, to have been stilled into a silence so vacant that he was almost afraid to move, and still stood on the spot where he’d been standing, just inside the sitting-room doorway, when she’d made her exit, suitcase in hand.

But I should at least have helped her downstairs with her things, he thought. There had been something so disturbing about the sight of her, carrying that large cardboard box down the stairs, hardly able to see over the top of it. She could have missed her footing. She could have fallen down the stairs. She might have broken her neck. And then the suitcase. It must have been heavy. It’s not as if she’s an Amazon. That old 1950s pigskin suitcase, from her mother’s old honeymoon luggage, with the watered silk lining beginning to fray: he remembered it, because they’d taken it on holiday to France last year, and it had earned them respect all over the Vaucluse. Useless for air travel, but just the thing on the road, in France. The French know how to read the signs at forty paces, no, make that metres. One of the very best things about being English was living next door to the French, who among all their other talents knew how to
place
a piece of luggage at
quarante mètres
: you could roll up at a decent hotel dirty and tired and crumpled at the end of a long day, and they’d give you one of their looks, but as soon as they saw that suitcase it was
chouette
, it was
oui monsieur je vous en prie madame pas de problème. Voilà
. He could remember exactly how heavy that suitcase was, taking it out of the car, glad to hand it over to someone else to carry upstairs to their room, and now she’d taken it all the way down two flights of stairs by herself: I can manage it easily, she said. Well, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t offered. It wasn’t his fault if he hadn’t helped her. That he should have this sense of having left undone something he ought to have done was totally unreasonable.

I suppose it’s time I had something to eat, he thought, and then I can get on with some work: because he’d brought some work home for the weekend. This Lloyd’s thing will go on and on
and on
, he thought: one of the biggest fuck-ups in the history of the world. It had come along at exactly the right moment for Jonathan: he was like an actor who has just been offered his first
Hamlet
. I’ll just get something to eat. He was quite hungry now he came to think of it.

But he didn’t go into the kitchen: instead he sat down for a moment on the sofa and looked at the fireplace, and wondered what was wrong, so terribly wrong; and then it came into focus again: it was the bare mantelpiece, of course. He remembered, now. She’d taken away all the dogs. Well, of course she had, they were her dogs. He hadn’t even liked them all that much—he’d used to tease her about them at first; they weren’t even good, most of them. ‘Bad dogs,’ he’d said. Except for the Derby pug he’d given her, that they’d seen one night, walking up Kensington Church Street together after seeing a film at the Odeon, looking in the windows of the antique shops on the way.

‘Oh, look, Jonathan,’ she’d said, in front of Stockspring, ‘a little dog! Isn’t it
sweet
!’

He was happy enough to humour her. He looked at the dog indulgently. ‘It is rather nice,’ he said. ‘A pug.’

‘I expect it’s expensive,’ she said. ‘Come on. But, oh,
sweet
. Look at its little face, and the tassels on its cushion.’

‘Yes,’ said Jonathan, making up his mind then and there; and he made a mental note of the telephone number on the fascia and rang the shop the very next morning, and got there just before they closed in the evening and bought the little dog, the dear little pug on its cushion, and took it home in his pocket, and when she was in the kitchen getting the casserole out of the oven, just before they sat down to eat at the dining table at the end of the sitting room—there, under the window—he’d put the little dog on her plate, and waited for her astonished, delighted, ecstatic discovery. The look on her face had been worth £300-odd of anyone’s money.

And why, why on earth was he remembering all these things now? What point, what benefit, what pleasure, to him to remember such things now, or ever? It was just that, in this first hour or so of his new existence the flat was so extremely silent, felt so extremely empty, had ceased, so uncannily, to breathe. He might, after all, go out and get some lunch in a pub; yes, that would be best. He could do with a pint. Good. He got to his feet and checked his pockets to make sure he had plenty of money on him and left the flat, slamming the door to expel all the ghosts and goblins and wanly wandering spirits that threatened to take possession of its immensely yawning, silent emptiness.

44

‘I hadn’t done a proper shop for ages,’ said Nicola. ‘There can’t be a scrap of food in the house.’

‘You should worry.’

‘All the same.’

‘For God’s
sake
. Sorry, sweetheart, don’t want to be harsh, but I
mean
—’

‘Oh, Susannah—’ and Nicola began to cry again.

Susannah patted her shoulder for a while, and poured her out a fresh cup of tea.

Nicola dried her eyes. ‘If only I knew,’ she said miserably, ‘what I’d done
wrong
.’

‘Very likely, nothing
whatsoever
.’

Nicola was staring at the far wall in a terrible effort to see into the past, which can be more difficult even than seeing into the future. ‘I suppose,’ she said slowly, ‘that it really was all brought on by my having to go off the pill.’

‘The old pill has caused a lot of problems, one way or another, if you ask me,’ said Susannah.

Nicola, trying to laugh, managed to smile. ‘I suppose that was what provoked Jonathan to consider the whole situation in depth, seriously,’ she continued. She was smiling no longer. ‘And then, to find it wanting. To find
me
wanting.’ She paused. ‘Which, after all, I am.’

‘But not in his sense,’ said Susannah sharply. ‘He’s the one who’s wanting, in that sense. And if I know anything about it, he’s going to end up wanting in the other sense too. He’s going to be as miserable as hell, once he comes to his senses.’

‘That’s where he thinks he’s come to
now
,’ said Nicola.

‘Well, he’s entirely wrong there,’ said Susannah very firmly. ‘If you ask me, the poor sod’s
actually
got a major rock in his head. So
there
.’

‘I wish I
knew
,’ said Nicola; ‘I wish I really knew what it all
means
. The worst of all is not
knowing
.’

‘Yes,’ said Susannah, squeezing her hand, ‘I know what you mean. That’s always the worst. Nevertheless,
I
vote for the rock. Think about it.’ They were silent for a while, then ‘Poor old Jonathan,’ said Susannah, unexpectedly.

Nicola looked at her, taken by surprise, and then briefly, faintly, smiled. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I guess.’

It was at this moment that, very fortunately, the front door opened and in a trice Guy came bouncing into the room. He leaped into the air and then struck an attitude. ‘Shazam!’ he cried. ‘Shazam! Guess what?’

‘Did you say hello to Nicola?’

‘Hello, Nicola!’ He turned back to his mother. ‘Guess!’

‘What?’

‘I trotted today!’

‘I say, well done! Whizzy!’

‘You
bet
. I say, Nicola—Nicola, would you like to see my mice now?’

‘I say, darling, I don’t think—’

‘I’ll just go and get them—hang on a tick.’

‘Oh, God. Sorry. He’s been so looking forward to showing you his mice—can you bear it?’

‘I’ve got nothing particular against mice.’

In fact she loathed them, but fortunately Guy returned with just one, and she endured its running up her arm and sitting, terrified, on her shoulder, quivering. Then the sight of its fear and bewilderment aroused feelings of real pity, if not affection.

‘Poor little thing,’ she said. ‘Poor little mouse.’

‘She’s not little,
for a mouse
,’ Guy pointed out. ‘She’s quite big, actually, as a mouse.’

Nicola began to laugh, as did Susannah; in a while, Nicola was laughing almost helplessly, and Guy, pleased with himself, had joined in too. When Geoffrey came in he couldn’t have seen even the slightest sign of anything but ease and merriment. Thank God at any rate for that, thought Susannah, with real gratitude.

45

The day died away around him, the dusk fell and the street lights came on; the liggers and the shoppers had all gone home and the revellers and rioters had not yet emerged: in the half-empty streets below him people walked their dogs and children circled each other on their bicycles, prolonging the last late evening minutes before going home to supper. Jonathan switched on the lamp and worked on for another hour.

Now it was dark; he got up and drew the curtains. Oh, but the silence! He turned on the wireless and went into the kitchen to see what he could find for dinner.

Now there was a thing. The food had been exclusively Nicola’s department. They’d had an inequitable—if you like—arrangement whereby he paid all the quarterly bills and she paid for the food. Once a fortnight or so they went to Sainsbury’s and stocked up, and she picked up other bits and pieces as and when and, as Jonathan now discovered, opening the refrigerator, she hadn’t been doing much picking up recently: why, after all, should she have? And he looked in the cupboards as well. Tinned soup, spaghetti, oil, vinegar, tea and coffee. Three eggs in the fridge, half a pound of butter, a hopelessly wilted lettuce and a sad tomato. In short, there was nothing to eat. There wasn’t even any bread. He wasn’t sure where he’d find a shop still open at this hour: the weekend catering, if not that of the lifetime ahead, was going to be an awfully big adventure. The only problem being, that he had no heart for it. Once more he checked his pockets to make sure he had enough money in them, once more he slammed the door upon the ghost-ridden flat, and went out into Notting Hill in search of sustenance. He chose the wrong direction, and so had to walk for a good ten minutes before he came to an open shop, but he managed to find everything he thought he wanted; two large carrier bags full. The place was full of people like him, lost souls shopping for groceries on a Saturday night. It was only when he got back to the flat and dumped the whole lot down on the kitchen table that at last he saw Nicola’s note.

She’d left him a note—yes, he remembered, now. She’d told him she’d left him a note. He’d quite forgotten about it, what with one thing and another. What thing, and what other thing, could have made him forget? Here, waiting for him after that journey across Lethe, was Nicola’s note: Nicola’s last words to him before leaving. He did not want to read it—not yet. But he must. Yes, but first he would just open that bottle of Graves he’d noticed in the door of the refrigerator. Always keep a bottle of white wine chilled and handy: there are moments when you need a
petit coup de blanc
like nothing else. Corkscrew, glass, draw the cork, so. Pour. Sniff. Taste. Smoke, raspberries, potash, whatever. Hunter Valley, eat your heart out. Another
petit coup
. Right; now for Nicola’s note.

Last Minute

1. Boxes marked Oxfam under window in bedroom.

2. Three other boxes of my gear in wardrobe, to be called for asap.

3. Don’t forget to leave out wages for Mrs Brick on Weds. mornings—£20 (in cash).

I’ve left you a note
, she’d said.
There’s nothing more to say
. No, quite: how could there be? It was commendably succinct. There was not, there had not been, another word to say.