Unfaithfully Yours (14 page)

You will all remember how, on those villa holidays we endured with such fortitude, Jas and Josh would hurl themselves on the various Lilos, rubber ducks and inflatable balls that seemed always to be lying around on the surface of the pool. And how they made a particular point of it if a vulnerable member of the party happened to be lying on the item in question. Conrad and Elaine were both nearly drowned on several occasions, greatly to Gerald’s amusement, although I did think he and John were about to come to blows on the day he shouldered Jas into the deep end with a shout of ‘Suck on that, wanker!’

Maybe Gerald has moved on. I somehow doubt it. Certainly Jas and Josh are still at that stage of development. Their daughters conceal their aggressive urges with the skill traditionally associated with females but, make no mistake, February, October, June and July are as viciously competitive when it comes to sticking and painting as their daddies were at contact sports. Have I got their names right? Maybe one of them is called November – she is dark, dim and gloomy enough for it to be a wholly appropriate name.

Jas did not entirely give up on medicine. He has somehow managed to wangle a position with a major pharmaceuticals company. His function, as far as I can tell, is to bribe GPs to buy his products. I am sure some of them work but they are the same outfit that recently touted a cure for diabetes that, while it was fairly effective, was also rumoured to send you blind after six months. ‘How were we to know?’ said Jas. ‘Anyway, most of the people who went blind were in the third world so who cares? They have crap lawyers.’

He has risen up the ranks fairly fast and now drives a BMW coupé to the various hospitals and group practices, where he trades, shamelessly, on his father’s profession. His brother, meanwhile, has given up on his entirely notional skills in the liberal arts for a job at a management consultancy where, so far, he has been personally responsible for firing about two thousand people. Not bad going for someone who got a third from Exeter and who has never read any book, apart from a Jamie Oliver cookbook, all the way through to the end. ‘It’s all bullshit!’ I often hear him say; the fact that he is holding down a highly paid job seems to show that he is absolutely right.

They get on very well with each other.

‘All right, Joshie?’

‘Not bad, Jazzer!’

‘Joshing along, are we?’

‘Not so bad, Jastic!’

And so on. They haven’t yet arrived at the stage of picking out each other’s fleas but otherwise their interaction is about that of a couple of low-grade apes. Needless to say, although I have absolutely nothing in common with them at all, they get on very well indeed with John.

John. John and Barbara. I was coming to that.

John – as some of you may know – is still passing on patients to people better qualified to deal with them: the traditional role of the GP, which he performs to perfection. His major speciality is reassurance. He is very good indeed at convincing people there is nothing wrong with them – even when there obviously is. Going to see him professionally, I always feel, must be a form of assisted suicide. Even in the simplest diagnosis he is almost bound to be wrong. Last year, for example, I had a problem with my knee. Well – to be precise – an agonizing pain in it for nearly two weeks. I made the mistake of asking him about it. He shook his handsome head slowly. ‘We have no idea,’ he said, ‘what goes on inside the knee. Not really.’

That was all he would say on the subject.

‘What about X-rays?’ I said.

A suspicious look glinted in his oh-so-compassionate blue eyes. ‘X-rays?’ he said, as if he was some nineteenth-century professor trying to come to terms with this curious new invention.

‘X-rays!’ I squeaked. ‘You shine them at the body and you can see the bones and everything!’ He looked intensely doubtful. ‘You know,’ I went on, ‘you can see what the problem is and then you cut the knee open and poke around inside it!’

He pursed his lips then, and got that sulky, childish look he always gets when the subject of illness is raised. ‘You don’t want to mess with knees!’ he said. ‘I sent some bloke with a knee problem to old Andy Boering at St Bee’s and—’

‘And what?’ I said.

‘He’s dead!’ said John, with what sounded like satisfaction. It turned out the ‘bloke’ was ninety-two.

As far as I can make out, he has a similarly hands-off approach to the poor idiots foolish or brave enough to be his officially recognized patients. They die like flies. ‘Cancer,’ he said, the other day at the dinner table, ‘is a total mystery, really. We have no idea what causes it or how to cure it. We are totally at a loss.’

But the problems John and I have go far deeper than his lack of talent for medicine. I suspect we are just another couple who married because they liked the look of each other. And then spent forty years and two children finding out we had absolutely nothing in common. What struck me as I looked around your faces last night – and where better to ask the existential questions than at a production of
Hamlet
? – was that the passion seemed to have gone out of all of us. The only individuals showing signs of life were little Micky Larner and Sam Dimmock – two people who, in the old days, seemed to have even less in common than those of us yoked together in marriage. Maybe they have fallen in love with each other!

But love, even love between two people who both strike me as physically repulsive, is better than nothing. We are all sixty or near to it. We shall be dead soon. As I looked around at you all, drinking warm white wine in that gloomy church hall, where we hosted parties for so many of our wretched children, I found myself thinking, What is the fucking point? What has it all been for? How can we do anything to change our destinies? Is it too late? Has any of us ever done anything brave, passionate, foolish or risky? Haven’t we all just paid our mortgages and got our opinions out of the newspapers and generally behaved like middle-class sheep? Which is what we are. Isn’t it? Can we not take a chance in what may well be the last decade of our lives? Can we agree not to go quietly?

Which brings me to me. Barbara Goldsmith.

Oh, I’m all right. I’ve been on television, haven’t I? So I must be all right. I’ve published five novels about people with marital difficulties in south-west London and two about people with marital difficulties in nineteenth-century France. One of which contained what some idiot in the
TLS
called ‘an unforgettable portrait of Gustave Flaubert’. Well – I had shagged him at the Wolverhampton Literary Festival in 2002. The critic, not Gustave Flaubert, Sam Dimmock. Gustave Flaubert is dead. I have written a ‘highly praised’ study of Mary Shelley. I hadn’t shagged the woman who praised it but I had said nice things about
her
highly praised study of George Eliot. I have appeared on
The Review Show
with a woman called Kirsty Walk; I hope I’m spelling that right. She had, I thought, a set of opinions that seemed to have been programmed by a machine. I was even on
Desert Island Discs
where I struck the radio critic of
The Times
as ‘hopelessly conceited’.

But I don’t care, you see. Everything I have done seems to me of very little interest. Everything done by my contemporaries seems of even less interest. The only writers I like are dead. The only scientists I like are dead. The only musicians I like are dead. And the only living people I want to like are my friends and family. But I haven’t got any friends and I can’t stand my family. I last fucked my husband four months ago and it was about as interesting as the foyer at Tate Modern. The people I used to think were my friends were my friends purely out of self-interest, and I think I returned the compliment with interest. That, it seems to me, is pretty typical of most people’s personal relationships.

There has been only one time in my life when I have been able to forget myself with another person. I am not, of course, going to say who that person was. Nobody, darlings, not even the Group Bitch, is going to be that frank. And yet there was a moment when even flowers seemed genuinely innocent and the world had the look of a suburban street after rain on a day when you know spring is coming. Wasn’t it that miserable bastard Philip Larkin who said that what will survive of us is love? God knows what he would know about it – wretched old stick that he was. Well, the poem was about two dead people, which is about the nearest Larkin would ever get to understanding a human being, or behaving like one, for that matter. The Movement! What a horrible bunch of tossers they were, weren’t they?

No, love is, or ought to be, about passion inspiring you to action; and there was a moment when I thought I had found the passion that would make me
do
something. You see, I was conscripted into the Mothers and Babies Club. I drifted into the suburbia that you all seem to think is everyone’s natural destiny, but all the time I knew there was another life waiting for me. One in which every minute of every day would be a different kind of risk. One in which I would be able to turn my back on all the small decisions that, over the years, have tightened into a rope that is strangling me, into a pillow that is pressed upon my face so hard I cannot breathe. My little life hangs, like a strangled doll, in the window of a big house, empty of furniture, in which somewhere, on a yet unvisited floor, a hideous stranger waits.

I turned my back on possibility. I turned my back on love. You’ve all done the same. But, my God, I loved! Helplessly and hopelessly and far too late to do anything about it because I had had children by then and it was all too late. It’s always too late. But it’s never too late. And I do not want it to be too late. That’s all I need to say. Let’s be honest about the smallness and ugliness of our lives. Let’s try to change – even though it is already too late.

Barbara Goldsmith

PS Who did that damage to Mary ‘If I laugh loud enough no one will notice I’m fat’ Dimmock’s face? I thought at first it was makeup, intended to suggest Ophelia was the victim of abuse, but it became clear later that someone really has been whacking her about. Gerald Price in rehearsal, perhaps.

PPS Was the freak in the long coat Conrad? And who was the stunning girl with the long hair who was making out with the Pakistani?

PPPS Elizabeth, the beret was a mistake. You looked grey with worry. It cannot be just the marking. And where, oh, where is your edition of Propertius? Will we ever see it?

PPPPS The remains of our little group all seem to be gossiping about the death of Pamela Larner. Somebody at the interval seemed to be suggesting she had been murdered. Hard to believe that anything so interesting would ever happen to dear Pamela. If she was killed – who did it? And why did they wait so long to carry out this important public service?

From:

Michael Larner

‘Chez Moi’

24 Lawson Crescent

Putney

30 October

To:

Barbara Goldsmith

101 Fellen Road

Putney

My God, Barbara!

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

Love! Passion! Violence of thought and feeling! Let us surrender to it! Now! I will tell you what is going on between Dimmock and Larner. It is love that is happening between us, Barbara. It is powerful and deep and crazy love – between a retired BBC wildlife-filmmaker and the best dentist in Putney. It is Tristan and Isolde, David and Jonathan, Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson and all the great loves of history rolled into one.

My life has changed. I wish I had the courage to write this letter, as you did, to more than one person. I wish I had the courage to post it on the Internet. But, of course, doing that would dilute the sense of it. Communication into a vacuum is meaningless, isn’t it? Which is why those ghastly blogs people write are so lacking in form and precision and sense. Even a casual remark is defined by those who hear it as well as the person who makes it. In addressing everybody you address nobody.

I am gay. Yes, I am gay. I am gay gay gay!!! I am totally and utterly gay!!! I am so gay I think I will explode with my gayness!!!! I cannot find the exclamation marks to describe quite how gay I am. I am utterly, utterly gay and I want the world to know that I am gay!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In a discreet way, of course, you understand. I do not want to parade my private life in front of a vulgar and hostile crowd. And yet . . . and yet . . . I do!!! I do!!! I do!!! It will be like Christ on the Via Whatever It Was when he was carrying the cross and people spat at him. I am pretty sure Jesus was gay. ‘The disciple whom Jesus loved’! Eh? Eh??? They just didn’t have the courage to write ‘The disciple to whom Jesus gave a hand job’! or ‘ The disciple who went down on Jesus and a few Roman soldiers as well, probably because he LIKED LEATHER’! They were all gay. Pontius Pilate was clearly gay. Herod was incredibly gay. Joseph was gay, for God’s sake. What other man would put up with his wife telling him she was pregnant by the ‘Holy Ghost’???? Eh?? In fact, I think everyone, when you look closely, is pretty gay. President Obama is gay. I am sure of it.

And I am gay, Barbara. Your wonderful letter gave me the courage to say it. To say it out loud – well, to you anyway.

I am gay. I hope I have made myself clear.

I think I first realized I was gay when I was having sex with Sam Dimmock on board his boat the
Jolly Roger
about five nautical miles off the Dorset coast. As I was being penetrated by him – with the boat plunging and soaring through the waves – I saw, for the first time, that I was almost certainly not a fully heterosexual man. And as, later that same night, I took his penis into my mouth on the deck of his elegant sloop, I reached a new height of awareness. It was a religious experience, Barbara!

It made sense of my life at last. It explained so many things. It explained my feelings about Pamela (or the lack of them) and it explained the terrible distance between my children and me. It went some way to explaining what happened to Barnaby in Thailand – although nothing can ever fully explain that, of course. But at least now I feel empowered to begin my search for him and for what he has become. Even if it is going to be hard to reach the Burmese border and to get inside the community to which he now belongs (we have heard rumours they have all gone to Cambodia although some say Dr Robert is in La Gomera in the Canary Islands), I am going to make that journey, make that trip. Oh, Barnaby, I am coming for you. I am going to tell you I am gay and we are going to really communicate!