Trading Futures (15 page)

That was why Anna mattered. She mattered because she had once encapsulated everything that had seemed important and, so far as I could tell, she still did. She mattered because I had once been
in love with her and, so far as I could tell, I still was. She mattered because she seemed, at this moment, to be the only person I knew who provided any tangible proof of the person I had once
been.

A large tabby cat melted into the room, its tail in the air, and deposited itself on Anna’s lap.

‘This is F Puss,’ she said.

‘I won’t ask what the F stands for.’

‘I couldn’t tell you. It was the name of Hemingway’s cat in Paris, so you would need to ask him. Personally, I don’t think it stands for what you think it does. F Puss
could be a Frédéric, or a François, but probably a Frank, I’d say. Americans don’t do foreign cultures. I think Hemingway had a rather formal, old-fashioned cat,
which thought it inappropriate to be on first-name terms with a stranger. I don’t think you would
tutoie
Hemingway’s cat.’

‘Hemingway would not have been a stranger’

‘Everyone’s a stranger to a cat.’

‘So when you said that in some respects you lived alone and in others you didn’t, were you referring to F Puss?’

‘Yes. And the hens.’

‘Why did you leave London?’

‘Why did I leave London? Well, the fact is that I was fucked up, not to put too fine a point upon it. Something happened to me in 1967. It doesn’t matter what it was. It wasn’t
very nice. It sounds pathetic to say that it changed everything, but it did.’

This was another conclusion I had reached at the time. There had seemed no explanation for how Anna had behaved towards me, other than the intervention of a dramatic event in her life. I felt
relieved when she told me that. It lessened my sense of rejection. And I felt that I was slowly starting to fill in the missing colours of Anna’s life.

‘Why should it sound pathetic?’ I asked.

‘Because I hate the blame culture, where everything that happens to you is someone else’s fault. It’s not just that it’s unattractive. It perpetuates everything
that’s negative about your life. You end up putting some event from the past in charge, and you can’t get your life back again. The event controls you. Everything is the fault of the
event. I could behave as stupidly as I liked, and by God I did, and none of it was my fault because it was the fault of the event. And yet . . .’

Her voice trailed away. She sat, eyes beyond the window, stroking F Puss in an absent-minded way.

‘And yet, if that thing hadn’t happened, none of the rest would have happened, in as far as you can make such a statement. So, to that extent, it was the fault of the
event.’

Another pause. F Puss purred encouragingly. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not explaining it very well.’

‘What happened afterwards?’

‘At the time, I was about to go to university. I felt really happy about life, better than I’ve ever felt. Positive. Confident. Over-confident probably. Full of the things I was
about to do then and later. A curtain came down. Instead of being alive, I felt dead. Nothing was any fun. I had no ambition. I didn’t eat properly. I couldn’t concentrate. I drank too
much; screwed around too much; did drugs. I hated every minute of university.

‘I had no idea what I wanted to do afterwards, so I went into advertising. It wasn’t a great job. I was a glorified secretary really, but it was supposedly a start. Or it should have
been a start. I must have done all right at it. But it bored me. I did it for about four years and then I quit. That was a completely stupid thing to do. I don’t like regrets any more than I
like blame, but I regret that. It turned out that the job was the only thing that had given my life structure, that had kept me on the rails. Without it, I was sunk. I didn’t work for more
than a year.’

‘How could you afford to live?’

I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the answer to that question. In ’67, Anna had advocated the merits of being a kept woman, or even a prostitute. I had assumed that she was being
provocative, that we were sharing a joke. Many assumptions about that conversation had since needed to be deconstructed.

‘I was living with someone at the time. He was earning decent money. I wasn’t in love with him. It wasn’t going anywhere. I was planning to leave him. It was a toss-up whether
I left him first, or left the job. I left the job. Somehow it never occurred to me that this might make it impossible to leave him. I don’t know what I thought. Probably that money grew on
trees, for a start. I suppose we all did. It always had.

‘Anyway, that was how it started. It got a lot worse from there. Perhaps it had nothing to do with what happened in ’67. Perhaps that’s my excuse. What’s
yours?’

As Anna asked that question, I found myself thinking of Cardinal Newman’s
Apologia Pro Vita Sua
: his defence of his own life. Perhaps this is the point we all reach in the end: to
be asked to explain, to defend, to excuse, to apologize for the lives we have led. No matter what we achieve, a gimlet prosecutor is at hand to point out deficiencies and contradictions, to expose
the compromises we have honeyed so subtly, to demand an absolute defence.

In the days when my parents used to drag me to church, I once heard a sermon on the sins of commission and omission. Most of us, the preacher opined, would be unlikely to commit many serious
sins. We had comfortable lives, in a comfortable country, in comfortable times. We would be unlikely to steal, to do murder. The less the necessity for sins of commission, the preacher said, the
greater the opportunity for sins of omission. Those were the ones that should concern us if we sought redemption.

I have spent my life omitting to do things I might have done. I’m not alone in this. Most of my generation has done the same thing. We have omitted to do almost everything good that we set
out to do. Now Anna was asking me to excuse the sum of my omissions.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure I’ve got an excuse. Not for my working life, anyway. I’ve never been able to work out how I ended up in the
City.’ I told her about the bet. I also told her that I was no longer sure there had ever been such a bet. Or, if there had been, that it was a sufficient explanation for my choice. Would I
really have based my career on a drunken evening in the bar and a bet of a fiver?

‘Why not?’ said Anna. ‘I’ve done far worse. It sounds plausible to me.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I was thinking about all this last night. Something else happened at the same time. That April, my brother died. 11th April 1970. It must have
been a week or two later that I applied for a job in the City. Perhaps that had something to do with it. Perhaps I needed a purpose, something quite different in which to immerse myself.’

‘How did he die?’

‘In a car. We never knew what exactly happened. It was late at night. He probably fell asleep at the wheel.’

More honeyed words. More elisions of the truth. More repetitions of a party line, hoping to win posterity’s favourable verdict. We never knew the trains were bound for Auschwitz. We never
knew black people got treated that way in Mississippi. We never knew exactly how Alan died. I knew all right.

Anna stood up. ‘Shall I make some lunch?’

‘I’d love some. What are you offering?’

‘I wasn’t expecting to offer anything. But we can have what we would have had yesterday: a ham salad.’

‘From your garden?’

‘The salad is. I don’t do pigs yet.’

‘How can I refuse?’ I said. ‘I’m glad it’s not chicken salad, though.’

We sat at the table and Anna opened a bottle of wine. The conversation veered from light to dark, from dark to light, as it had all morning.

When the meal was over, Anna said: ‘I normally go and lie on my bed for half an hour after lunch. Do you want to join me?’

I admired the delicacy of the question. It was not a direct invitation to make love, but it carried the implication that, if I chose to place that interpretation upon it, Anna would not demur. I
did choose to place that interpretation. I also chose to delay it, to leave open the question of interpretation for a while. So we lay on Anna’s bed, my arm around her, fingers ruffling her
hair, talking. It felt like lying in the long grass again, on another Blackdown.

‘Have you ever been married?’ I asked.

‘No. Never.’

I wondered what had made her tell that lie.

‘Children?’

No,’ said Anna. ‘No children. Although . . .’

‘Although?’

‘I had an abortion once. But no children.’

‘A regret?’

‘The abortion, or the lack of children?’

‘Either.’

‘The two were related,’ said Anna. ‘Yes. I regret not having children. Do I regret the abortion? Pass. I don’t know. I’ve never known.’

‘Was that what happened in ’67?’

‘It was part of what happened in ’67. I had gone backpacking in Italy for a few weeks before I went to university. It happened there. And then I found I was pregnant. I didn’t
want the baby. It seemed an easy decision at the time. If someone had told me it was either that baby or no babies, I don’t know what I would have decided. I just don’t know. Anyway,
after that, I was unable to have children. I don’t know whether that was because of the operation or whether it would have happened anyway.

‘The long decline started then. After I left advertising, I had jobs, but I never had another career. I was scraping to get by for years, moving in with men and moving out again. I came
off the pill when I was about twenty-eight. I wanted to get pregnant. I wasn’t very choosy who the father was by then. The older I got, the more desperate I became. I went to live in Paris. I
had missed out on France, for some reason. I’d never been there. I’d always thought everyone should try living in Paris for a while.’

So Anna hadn’t gone to France in ’67. Her plans must have changed in the fortnight after our afternoon on Blackdown. She had gone to Italy instead. The wrong choice, it had turned
out, as wrong as my choice not to go with her.

‘Did you enjoy Paris?’

‘I enjoyed the idea of Paris,’ said Anna. ‘I enjoyed the idea of shabby back-street cafés that reeked of petty affairs and Gitanes
papier maïs
. I enjoyed
the idea of pastis on a pavement in St-Germain, or strolling down the Rue Mouffetarde. I enjoyed the idea of men shooting sidelong glances at me when they thought their wives weren’t looking,
of waiters half my age sizing me up. But these were only ideas. They weren’t life, even if for a while they were part of life. It’s quite easy to fall in love with an idea, don’t
you think?’

‘Usually better than falling in love with reality,’ I said.

‘No,’ said Anna. ‘It’s better to fall in love with reality. If you can.’

There was little colour in Anna’s bedroom, and what there was had leached from it. We lay on a bleached bed between bleached walls, light within light, our bodies the only things
breathing, the only things real. The ticking of the clock. The clock ticking. The silken thread that ran from that day to this.

‘I sometimes feel that my whole life has been a waste of time,’ I said. ‘Don’t you?’

‘I used to,’ said Anna. ‘Not recently. Why should you feel that?’

‘I’ve achieved nothing.’

‘It depends on what you call nothing. Do you have kids?’

‘Yes. Two.’

‘That’s two more than me. I would call that an achievement. Does your wife love you?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Amazingly, I think she does.’

‘Another achievement,’ said Anna. ‘I expect that, if we were to look carefully, we would find quite a few achievements.’

‘They don’t amount to very much.’

‘Your words. Not mine.’

‘What I mean is that we thought we would achieve big things. There were meant to be grand projects. How could it dissolve to so little?’

‘Well it has,’ said Anna. ‘And in its littleness, it is the little things that matter.’

Little things like tenderness, like touch, like the brushing of hair on skin? Little things like white clouds racing across a blue sky? Little things like birdsong and the smell of mown hay?

We made love in phases that afternoon, at first languidly, then desperately, then sensuously. Anna’s skin was soft and supple as we wrapped ourselves around each other. She smelt of fresh
air, not of expensive perfumes. She was eager, as eager as I was, but we took our time. I had waited so long for this moment and wanted to savour it. I felt that Anna must have waited quite a long
time as well.

‘How long are you staying?’ she asked later.

‘I should be going soon.’

‘Another man who creeps away in the morning.’

‘In the afternoon,’ I said.

‘Will I see you again?’

‘Do you want to?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Anna. ‘The answer’s yes, really. In fact, hugely. But I’m not sure it would be wise.’

‘Why shouldn’t it be wise?’

‘Matthew, if I appear a little detached, it’s because I’ve learned to be this way. I didn’t just get my fingers burnt. All of me was burnt. I had to learn to take care of
myself, and part of that was keeping people at a distance, keeping men at a distance. It’s not that I don’t want someone in my life. But I’m scared of removing the bandages and
getting burned all over again. I’m not sure I could bear it.’

‘I understand,’ I said.

‘Men always say they understand, and sometimes they do, and more often they don’t. I’m sure you want to understand, Matthew, but it doesn’t mean that you can. This has
all happened very suddenly. Thank you for being honest and telling me about your job. But there’s plenty else about you that I don’t know. Your marriage, and your family, for a start. I
haven’t asked because it’s none of my business, and I’m not going to ask now, but it does have a bearing on things, doesn’t it? I don’t know what’s on offer. Do
you?’

‘Not entirely, no.’

‘I think I would like to know before we see each other again.’

‘Shall I be in touch when I can answer the question?’

‘Yes,’ said Anna. ‘Please do.’

What I have decided to do is simple. I shall pull off the A303 in a few minutes and call home. If Judy is there, and if she answers, I will say that I’ll be home at about
eight. If she isn’t, or if she doesn’t answer, I’ll turn the car round, go back to Anna, and tell her that I’m back. To stay. I’m a gambler, for goodness’ sake.
Perhaps it’s about time to start behaving like one.