Written on the Body (17 page)

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said. ‘A happy marriage has
nothing to do with it.’

‘Then why wasn’t he?’ She slammed the door and I heard her crying in the hall. Was it for her lost connection with the great and the good or was it for her daughter?

Evening. Couples out on the sweating streets hand in hand. From an upper window a reggae band with a long way to go. Restaurants were pushing the alfresco style, but a wicker chair on a dirty street with the buses grinding by isn’t Venice. I watched the litter blow among the pizzas and raffia carafes. A vulpine waiter fixed his dicky bow in the cashier’s mirror, slapped her bottom, put a peppermint on his red tongue and swaggered over to a group of under-age girls drinking Campari and soda. ‘Would madams like a something to a eat?’

I caught the first bus regardless of its destination. What did it matter since I was no nearer to Louise? The city was suppurating. The bus driver wouldn’t open the doors while the bus was moving. The air in there smelt of burger and chips. There was a fat woman in a sleeveless nylon frock sitting with her legs apart fanning herself with her shoe. Her make-up had slipped into ledges of grime.

‘OPEN THE DOORS FUCKFACE,’ she shouted.

‘Fuck off,’ said the driver without looking round. ‘Can’t you read the notice? Can’t you read?’

The notice said
DO NOT DISTRACT DRIVER WHILE BUS IS IN MOTION
. We were stock still in a traffic jam at the time.

As the temperature mounted the man in front of me resorted to his mobile phone. Like all mobile phone users he had nothing urgent to say, he simply wanted to say it. He looked at us all to see if we were looking at him. When he finally said, ‘Goo nye then my mate Kev,’ I asked
him very politely if I might borrow it for a moment and offered him a pound coin. He was reluctant to separate himself from such an essential part of his machismo but he agreed to punch in the number for me and hold the phone to my ear. After it had rung pointlessly a few times he said, ‘That’s out then,’ pocketed my pound and hung his treasure back round his neck on a bulldog chain. There had been no answer at Louise’s house. I decided to go and see for myself.

I found a cab to take me through the thick heat of the dying day and we turned into the square at the same moment as Elgin’s BMW pulled up at the kerb. He got out and opened the passenger door for a woman. She was a little business suit number, serious make-up and the sort of hairdo that looks on tempests and is never shaken. She had a small travel bag, Elgin a suitcase, they were laughing together. He kissed her and fumbled for his keys.

‘You gettin’ out or not?’ asked my driver.

I was trying to control myself. On the doorstep breathing deeply I rang the bell. Keep calm Keep calm Keep calm.

The hot date answered the door. I smiled brightly and walked around her into the wide hall. Elgin had his back to me.

‘Darling …’ she began.

‘Hello Elgin.’

He spun round. I didn’t think people did that in real life, only in kooky crime thrillers. Elgin moved like Fred Astaire and placed himself between me and the hot date. I don’t know why.

‘Go and make some tea, darling, will you,’ he said and off she went.

‘Do you have to pay her to be so obedient or is it love?’

‘I told you never to come here again.’

‘You told me a great many things I should have ignored. Where’s Louise?’

For a split second Elgin looked genuinely surprised. He thought I should know. I looked at the hall. There was a new table with curved legs, a hideous thing in maple inlaid with brass strips. No doubt it had come from the kind of shop where there are no prices but it had its price painted all over it. It was the sort of hall table interior designers buy for Arab clients. Next to it was a radiator. Louise hadn’t been here for some time.

‘Let me show you out,’ said Elgin.

I grabbed him by his tie and jammed him against the door. I’ve never had any boxing lessons so I had to fight on instinct and cram his windpipe into his larynx. It seemed to work. Unfortunately he couldn’t speak. ‘Are you going to tell me what’s happened, are you?’ Pull the tie a bit tighter and watch his eyes pop out.

The hot date came tripping back up the stairs with two mugs. Two mugs. How rude. She stopped dead still like a ham actor then screamed, ‘LET GO OF MY FIANCE.’ I was so shocked I did. Elgin punched me in the stomach and winded me against the wall. I slipped on to the floor honking like a seal. Elgin kicked me in the shins but I didn’t feel that until later. All I could see were his shiny shoes and her patent leather peep-toes. I threw up. While I was crouched over the black and white diamond tiles of the marble floor like an extra in a Vermeer, Elgin said as pompously as a half-strangled man can, ‘That’s right, Louise and I are divorced.’ I was still coughing up egg and tomato sandwich but I struggled to my feet with the grace of an old wino, wiped my hand across my mouth and dragged its stippled backside down Elgin’s blazer.

‘God you’re disgusting,’ said the hot date. ‘God.’

‘Would you like me to tell you a bedtime story?’ I asked her. ‘All about Elgin and his wife Louise? Oh and about me too?’

‘Darling, go out to the car and telephone for the police will you?’ Elgin opened the door and the hot date scuttled out. Even in my decrepit state I was taken aback. ‘Why does she have to phone from the car, or are you showing off?’

‘My fiancée is telephoning from the car for her own safety.’

‘Not because there’s something you don’t want her to hear?’

Elgin smiled pityingly, he had never been very good at smiling, mostly his mouth just moved around his face. ‘I think it’s time you left.’

I looked down the road to the car. The hot date had the phone in one hand and the instruction manual on her knee.

‘I think we’ve got a few minutes, Elgin. Where’s Louise?’

‘I don’t know and I don’t care.’

‘That’s not what you said at Christmas.’

‘Last year I thought I could make Louise see sense. I was mistaken.’

‘It didn’t have anything to do with the Civil List did it?’

I didn’t expect him to react but his pale cheeks turned clown-red. He pushed me roughly down the steps. ‘That’s enough, get out.’ My mind cleared and for a brief Samson moment my strength returned. I stood below him on the steps, below the water-line of his envy. I remembered the morning when he had challenged us in the kitchen. He had wanted us to be guilty, to creep away, our pleasure
ruined by adult propriety. Instead Louise had left him. The ultimate act of selfishness; a woman who puts herself first.

I was colt-mad. Mad with pleasure at Louise’s escape. I thought of her packing her things, closing the door, leaving him for ever. She was free. Is that you flying over the fields with the wind under your wing? Why didn’t I trust you? Am I any better than Elgin? Now you’ve made fools of us both and sprung away. The snare didn’t close on you. It closed on us.

Colt-mad. Break Elgin. This is where my feelings will spill, not over Louise in fountains of thankfulness but here down on him in sulphurous streams.

He started motioning to the hot date, his arms in extravagant semaphore, a silly puppet boy with the keys to a fancy car.

‘Elgin, you’re a doctor, aren’t you? Then you’ll recall that a doctor can guess the size of someone’s heart by the size of their fist. Here’s mine.’

I saw Elgin’s look of complete astonishment as my fists, locked together in unholy prayer, came up in a line of offering under his jaw. Impact. Head snapped back, sick crunch like a meat grinder. Elgin at my feet in foetus position bleeding. He’s making noises like a pig at the trough. He’s not dead. Why not? If it’s so easy for Louise to die why is it so hard for Elgin to do the same?

The anger went out of me. I moved his head to a more comfortable position, fetching a cushion from the hall. As I propped his crushed face a tooth fell out. Gold. I put his glasses on the hall table and walked slowly down the steps towards the car. The hot date was half in half out, her mouth fluttering like a moth. ‘God. God, oh
my God, God.’ As though repetition might achieve what faith could not.

The phone dangled uselessly from its strap around her wrist. I could hear the crackly voice of the operator ‘Fire Police Ambulance. Which service do you require? Fire Police Ambulance. Which …’ I took the phone gently. ‘Ambulance. 52 Nightingale Square, NW3.’

When I got back to my flat it was dark. My right wrist was badly swollen and I was limping. I put ice into a couple of carrier bags and Sellotaped them around my gammy limbs. I wanted nothing but sleep and I did sleep on the dusty unchanged sheets. I slept for twenty hours then got a cab to the hospital and spent almost as long in the Outpatients Department. I had cracked a bone in my wrist.

In plaster up to my elbow I made a list of every hospital that had a cancer unit. None of them had heard of Louise Rosenthal or Louise Fox. She was not undergoing treatment anywhere. I spoke to her consultant who refused to tell me anything except that he was not advising her at that time. Those friends of hers I had met had not seen her since May when she had suddenly disappeared. I tried her solicitor for the divorce. She no longer had a contact address. After a great deal of difficulty I persuaded her to give me the address she had been using during the case.

‘You know this is unethical?’

‘You know who I am?’

‘I do. And that is why I am making an exception.’

She disappeared to rustle among her files. My lips were dry.

‘Here we are: 41a Dragon St NW1.’

It was the address of my flat.

I stayed in London for six weeks until the beginning of October. I had resigned myself to charges being brought against me for whatever damage I had done to Elgin. None came. I walked over to the house to find it shuttered. For reasons of his own I wouldn’t be hearing from Elgin again. What reasons when he could avenge himself on me, possibly with a prison sentence? It horrifies me to think about that madness, I’ve always had a wild streak, it starts with a throbbing in the temple and then a slide into craziness I can recognise but can’t control. Can control. Had controlled for years until I met Louise. She opened up the dark places as well as the light. That’s the risk you take. I couldn’t apologise to Elgin because I wasn’t sorry. Not sorry but ashamed, does that sound strange?

In the night, the blackest part of the night, when the moon is low and the sun hasn’t risen, I woke up convinced that Louise had gone away alone to die. My hands shook. I didn’t want that. I preferred my other reality; Louise safe somewhere, forgetting about Elgin and about me. Perhaps with somebody else. That was the part of the dream I tried to wake out of. None the less it was better than the pain of her death. My equilibrium, such as it was, depended on her happiness. I had to have that story. I told it to myself every day and held it against my chest every night. It was my comforter. I built different houses for her, planted out her gardens. She was in the sun abroad. She was in Italy eating mussels by the sea. She had a white villa that reflected in the lake. She wasn’t sick and deserted in some rented room with thin curtains. She was well. Louise was well.

Characteristic of the leukaemic body is a rapid decline after remission. Remission can be induced by radiotherapy or chemotherapy or simply it can happen, no-one is sure why. No doctor can accurately predict whether the disease will stabilise or for how long. This is true of all cancers. The body dances with itself.

The progeny of the stem cell stop dividing, or the rate radically slows, tumour growth is halted. The patient may no longer be in pain. If remission comes early in the prognosis, before the toxic effects of the treatment have battered the body into a wholly new submission, the patient may feel well. Unfortunately, hair loss, skin discoloration, chronic constipation, fever and neurological disturbances are likely to be the price for a few months more life. Or a few years. That’s the gamble.

Metastasis is the problem. Cancer has a unique property; it can travel from the site of origin to distant tissues. It is usually metastasis which kills the patient and the biology of metastasis is what doctors don’t understand. They are not conditioned to understand it. In doctor-think the body is a series of bits to be isolated and treated as necessary, that the body in its very disease may act as a whole is an upsetting concept. Holistic medicine is for faith healers and crackpots, isn’t it? Never mind. Wheel round the drugs trolley, bomb the battlefield, try radiation right on the tumour. No good? Get out the levers, saws, knives and needles. Spleen the size of a football? Desperate measures for desperate diseases. Especially so since metastasis has often developed before the patient sees a doctor. They don’t like to tell you this but if the cancer is already on the move, treating the obvious problem, lung, breast, skin, gut, blood, will not alter the prognosis.

I went to the cemetery today and walked amongst the catacombs thinking of the dead. On the older graves the familiar skull and crossbones bore on me with uncomfortable gaiety. Why do they look so pleased, those grinning heads robbed of any human touch? That skulls should grin is repellent to us who come with dark flowers and mournful sober faces. This is a mourning ground, a place of silence and regret. For us, overcoats against the rain, the grey sky and the grey tombs together oppress. Here is the end of us all, but let’s not look that way. While our bodies are solid and resist the slicing of the wind, let’s not think of the deep mud or the patient ivy whose roots will find us out.

Six bearers in long coats and white scarves carried the body to the grave. To call it a grave at this stage would be to dignify it. In a garden it might be a trench for a new asparagus bed. Fill it with manure and plant it out. An optimistic hole. But this is not an asparagus bed, it is the last resting place of the deceased.

Observe the coffin. This is full oak not veneer. The handles are solid brass not lacquered steel. The lining of the coffin is raw silk padded with seabed sponge. Raw silk rots so gracefully. It makes an elegant tattering around the corpse. The acrylic linings, cheap and popular, don’t decompose. You may as well be buried in a nylon sock.