The Insect Farm (18 page)

I knew that there was nothing else to say, and it was with the greatest difficulty imaginable that I appeared to remain calm while Roger finished his food. I felt as though someone had reached out their hand towards me, stuck it down my throat, grabbed my guts and wrenched them out and onto the floor in front of me. I felt empty and in pain. I said nothing. I could say nothing. We ate the rest of our food in silence; Roger absorbed with his fish fingers and the prospect of going to the insect farm; me utterly lost in a labyrinth of despair.

Afterwards he and I walked the few blocks towards the allotments and I, as I had promised, went through the motions of paying attention as he spoke about his ants and his sticklebacks and his stag beetles and his worms. I listened as he talked about how they gathered their food and how they organized their lives, no doubt entirely oblivious to the fact that they were part of another larger world, where other beings also lived their lives, themselves every bit as unaware of their irrelevance to the wider universe.

Chapter Sixteen

How is it possible for anyone ever to believe the idea that an emotion can be adequately conveyed by a mere combination of words? How could we ever think that anyone who hadn’t experienced them could glean from words on a page even the slightest inkling of what an intensely felt passion is really like?

I describe a wall as painted red, and if you have seen the colour red before then you may have an idea of what I am talking about. Perhaps you are picturing something from the Union Jack while I am picturing something from a pillar box, but we’re likely to be in the same territory. Red is red, or something close to it. I say “red” and you have in your mind’s eye something similar to what I have in my mind’s eye. It works.

Or I can describe a day as sunny or a surface as rough, and, as you have experienced sunny days and rough surfaces, you can get an idea of what I am talking about. The warmth of the sun on your skin, the feeling of harshness under the palm of your hand. But how can anyone describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it the exquisite pain that arises from the feeling that the person with whom you are so deeply in love is in love with someone else? How can that happen?

Most of us have put our fingers momentarily into the flame of a candle. Does it give you any idea of what it is like to
experience first-degree burns in a fire? Not really. You know it is unpleasant, and the merest hint of what it might be like to keep your finger in the flame makes you withdraw it with an instant and involuntary reaction. The experience of being burned is so horrendous that the body automatically recoils from getting any closer than is unavoidable to the full-blown experience.

So when someone you love has shown a moment of inappropriate affection for another person, you may have experienced a pang of jealousy. Or the kiss under the mistletoe, or under the influence, that takes just a second longer than you are comfortable about. You feel a twinge, but nothing you are likely to have experienced as a result of such a commonplace comes anywhere close to the tangible, physical, corrosive agony that accompanies full-blown jealousy. Nothing comes close.

The nearest I can get to conveying it is to think about a heavy weight in your stomach, or rather a heavy weight just above your stomach, sitting somewhere between your guts and your heart. A physical lump, with actual mass, just sitting there. It feels for all the world like a cancer, or like a tumour that you know is going to turn into a cancer in years to come. A physical trauma that will trigger something debilitating which, in its turn, will eventually kill you.

Have you heard the expression “You don’t know where to put yourself”? That applies here. You don’t. You walk from room to room, unable to settle in one place. You sit, and then
you get up and walk around some more. Lying down, you find that the weight of it shifts onto your lungs and that you cannot get your breath. You sit up, panting, stiff, congested and unable to get the oxygen circulating properly through the bloodstream.

The images that swim around your head are all physical. His view of her as she takes off her clothes and moves towards him. His eyes perusing that beautiful lustrous body that you think of as all your own. Your property. Your domain. Other eyes admiring it. Other hands upon it.

Her view of him, up close, as she brings the lips that you have so often kissed up to kiss his neck and his chest and his mouth. Just as she has so often kissed you. His face is not your face. His neck is not your neck; she knows it and yet she kisses him as avidly as ever she has kissed you.

Then an outside view of the two of them, entwined in a tight and sweaty embrace, tongues and bodies locked together in passion. No, even though the words come nowhere near the reality, I cannot write more. Even now, so many years after the event, the pain is every bit as sharp as it was all that time ago.

I simply cannot understand or explain how I managed to survive the time before I saw Harriet again. It was three weeks before the Christmas holidays and there was no question of her being able to come down for a weekend before then, and so I had no choice but to live with my demons. Nothing to do but to wait and drink the nights away. Not only did I have to wait, but I had to remain calm. I could not afford to let Roger
know what his observation had done to me. I could not allow Harriet to get a hint that I was in hell. Any hope of managing the situation lay in the possibility of remaining in control; and so I had to quell my instinctive desire to fall to my knees and release a scream of anguish, and instead to go about my usual routine just as though everything in my life was still normal.

But nothing was. It sounds now as though it must be an exaggeration, but I really don’t think that I got more than an hour per night of uninterrupted sleep in the entire three weeks from the moment Roger told me his story. Each night I lay in bed, contorted with anguish at the thoughts which flooded into my head and laid siege to my sanity. Each night I turned over in my mind the various words of reassurance that Harriet had used whenever we discussed our lives apart. I recalled in precise detail the conversation we had had when I succumbed to my unwise outburst about Brendan remaining a part of our lives. Perhaps I should have realized then? Her response had been so angry, so over the top. Perhaps there was a clue that I had missed?

I thought about the reassurance her words had given me, about the regret and the anguish I had felt for being so stupid as to harbour even the smallest suspicion. I lay in bed and thought of these things, and no force on earth could prevent my mind from travelling the three hundred miles which I could not travel with my body to the little room at the top of the stairs in the house which Harriet was said to be sharing with three other girls.

There she was, right at this moment, the woman that I loved more than the moon and the stars and all the riches of the earth, embracing and kissing and fucking the man I already hated more than anyone else on the planet. Here was I, at precisely the same moment, at the other end of the country, lying in my bed, sad, alone, pathetic and weeping for the betrayal of my faith.

My mind went through the whole gamut of possibilities. Sometimes I would grasp at the idea that Roger might still have been mistaken. I was a drowning man reaching out to a lifeboat. Yes, perhaps that was possible. After all, Roger is an idiot. Yes, he is; what am I doing taking the word of an idiot above the promise from the woman I love? Have I lost my mind? All this anger and torture and despair for nothing. A misunderstanding, a case of mistaken identity – anything could be possible.

Seldom did the respite last more than just a few minutes, as I recalled the occasion that Roger had described and remembered the circumstances, and also the look on his face when he had returned from his errand. Of course, there was no mistake. I, Jonathan Maguire, had voluntarily absented myself from the side of the woman I loved, and my presence and my affections had been replaced by Brendan fucking Harcourt. What could be sadder? Or more predictable? Or more pathetic?

My preoccupation – no, my obsession with the stark realities of the situation meant that it was only in the last week
before the end of the autumn term that I began to think about how I would handle the situation directly with Harriet. She had been due to come back on the following Thursday evening, but on the Monday evening she called and said that she had made better than expected progress with an essay she had been working on, and was now planning to come the following day instead.

“I’ve bought tickets for Thursday,” she said, “and I think I will have to pay extra if I change the day I travel.” She asked me what I thought. I said that she should get on the earlier train.

“Maybe the conductor won’t notice the date. Or if he does, you can no doubt charm him. And if the worst comes to the worst, you can always pay the difference. It’s got to be worth it for the two extra days.”

So now she was coming home tomorrow and my mind went into overdrive. In those twenty-four hours I imagined every eventuality. At times I thought that perhaps I would confront her and that she would immediately offer an explanation which was comprehensive and unassailable. I would breathe a sigh of relief which could propel an ocean-going yacht, and tell her what an idiot I had been. She would laugh at my silliness, and all the suffering, so awful and unbearable for such a long time, would quickly melt away to become just a ghastly nightmare.

Those times were few and brief. At other times I imagined her stunned into silence by my revelation, and then confessing
all and imploring me for forgiveness. I did not consider what I would do in such circumstances. The wound was so deep that contemplating forgiveness was impossible, and yet the notion of being without her? Equally not possible.

Lastly, and most frequently, I anticipated Harriet telling me that she was sorry that I had found out in this way, that she had intended to tell me herself, and that she was planning to leave me to go to live with Brendan. Again, in such circumstances, I had no idea how I would be able to handle the situation. The set of facts were so repugnant that my brain simply refused to engage, and I found myself staring into an abyss.

Sometimes at the end of term, and especially if she had a lot of luggage to bring down, I would go to meet Harriet at King’s Cross. While secretly hating it, I always managed to appear to do so willingly. I hated it almost as bitterly as I hated going to see her off. A formerly magnificent building which had seen a glorious history now down at heel and surrounded by a seedy selection of tramps and drunks and pathetic men, heads down, darting in and out of massage parlours. The idea of staging an emotional scene in such a godforsaken hole, be it either of the pain of parting or the joy of reunion, was anathema to me, and something I would wish to avoid if at all possible. If Harriet had heavy bags to carry, then it was not possible to avoid it. On this occasion, thank heavens, it was.

I was keen that Roger should be out of the house when Harriet arrived back, because I did not trust myself to be able to
act normally and to hold it together for long after her arrival. Whatever was to transpire, having Roger on the scene could only add complications. In his own very different way, Roger was probably as attached to Harriet as I was. The realization that we were quite possibly losing her, coupled as it could easily be with the revelation that he was an unwitting player in the drama, might cause unpredictable results. No, if we were losing Harriet, then I needed to be able to manage the way the news was broken to Roger.

Once again I am ashamed to admit it, but I packed a bag with some overnight things for Roger, and took it with me as I went down early to meet the bus. Terry’s father was already there and waiting.

“Hello, Mr Harries,” I said, “I wanted to apologize to you for my reaction to your suggestion a couple of weeks ago that Roger might come and spend the night with you and Terry. It just came a bit out of the blue, and Roger usually doesn’t like to have his routines messed up.” He was a very nice man and said that he understood completely. I suspected that he understood only too well, and was used to the sort of slight that I had dealt him. “Anyway, rather than let him have time to get too worked up about it, if by any chance it suited you, I thought we might try it overnight tomorrow night? If it’s not convenient for you, just say. But if it does work for you, I thought you could take his overnight bag with you now, and then you could meet the bus and let him come back home with you tomorrow?”

I didn’t feel too good about the fact that, for purely selfish reasons, I was accepting the offer which before I had been so keen to reject. However, if he was offended, Terry’s father showed no sign of it and appeared to be very happy with the arrangement. Of course I had no sleep whatever on Monday night, and I waited until Tuesday morning to tell Roger that he would be staying overnight with his friend Terry. He seemed to be excited by the idea, so much so that I then felt guilty about not having arranged something like it sooner.

I have no clear memory of how I passed the day while I waited for Harriet. I think of it as a blur of images and emotions of a nature and intensity I had never known before. It’s as close as I have ever come, thank God, to having an idea of what it must be like for a condemned man to know that he would die within a few hours. A last meal? How could anyone eat in such circumstances? Last words? What words could possibly sum up all the multitude and variety of thoughts and feelings? I padded around the flat for some hours, then decided that I might be able to get some relief from taking a bath, but in the event I found that when I immersed myself it was as though the weight of water was constricting my breathing still further. I quickly got out and gulped down air. I thought I would faint, but at last my head cleared.

I watched the clock tick around, focusing hard on the big hand, and found that I could identify all sixty of the tiny movements in the measured minute. Three hundred would take me five minutes. 3,600 would get me to an hour.