Written on the Body (3 page)

At that moment I heard the opening bars of ‘Strangers in the Night’. It was Inge’s signal to say we had five minutes ready or not. I motioned my doubting John Thomases through the door and broke into a run. I had to get into the mobile burger-bar Inge used as a hide-out. I threw myself in beside her and looked back from between the bread rolls. It was a beautiful explosion. A splendid explosion, much too good for a load of demi-johns. We were alone on the edge of the world, terrorists fighting the good fight for a fairer society. I thought I loved her and then came the pigeons.

She forbade me to telephone her. She said that telephones were for Receptionists, that is, women without status. I said, fine, I’ll write. Wrong, she said. The Postal Service was run by despots who exploited non-union labour. What were we to do? I didn’t want to live in Holland. She didn’t want to live in London. How could we communicate?

Pigeons, she said.

That is how I came to rent the attic floor of the Pimlico Women’s Institute. I don’t feel a great deal about the Women’s Institute either way, they were the first to campaign against aerosols that contain CFCs and
they make a mean Victoria sponge but I don’t really care. The point was that their attic faced roughly in the direction of Amsterdam.

I can tell by now that you are wondering whether I can be trusted as a narrator. Why didn’t I dump Inge and head for a Singles Bar? The answer is her breasts.

They were not marvellously upright, the kind women wear as epaulettes, as a mark of rank. Neither were they pubescent playboy fantasies. They had done their share of time and begun to submit to gravity’s insistence. The flesh was brown, the aureoles browner still, nipples bead black. My gypsy sisters I called them, though not to her. I had idolised them simply and unequivocally, not as a mother substitute nor a womb trauma, but for themselves. Freud didn’t always get it right. Sometimes a breast is a breast is a breast.

Half a dozen times I picked up the phone. Six times I put it down again. Probably she wouldn’t have answered. She would have had it disconnected but for her mother in Rotterdam. She never did explain how she would know it was her mother and not a Receptionist. How she would know it was a Receptionist and not me. I wanted to talk to her.

The pigeons, Adam, Eve and Kissmequick, couldn’t manage Holland. Eve got as far as Folkestone. Adam dropped out and went to live in Trafalgar Square, another victory to Nelson. Kissmequick was scared of heights, a drawback for a bird, but the WI took him in as their mascot and rechristened him Boadicea. If he has not died yet he is still living. I don’t know what happened to Inge’s birds. They never came to me.

Then I met Jacqueline.

I had to lay a carpet in my new flat so a couple of friends came over to help. They brought Jacqueline. She was the mistress of one of them confidante of both. A sort of household pet. She traded sex and sympathy for £50 to tide her over the weekend and a square meal on Sunday. It was a civilised if brutal arrangement.

I had bought a new flat to start again from a nasty love affair that had given me the clap. Nothing wrong with my organs, this was emotional clap. I had to keep my heart to myself in case I infected somebody. The flat was large and derelict. I hoped I might rebuild it and myself at the same time. The clap-giver was still with her husband in their tasteful house but she’d slipped me £10,000 to help finance my purchase. Give/Lend was how she put it. Blood money was how I put it. She was buying off what conscience she had. I intended never to see her again. Unfortunately she was my dentist.

Jacqueline worked at the Zoo. She worked with small furry things that wouldn’t be nice to visitors. Visitors who have paid £5 don’t have a lot of patience for small furry things who are frightened and want to hide. It was Jacqueline’s job to make everything bright and shiny again. She was good with parents, good with children, good with animals, good with disturbed things of every kind. She was good with me.

When she arrived, smart but not trendy, made-up but not conspicuously, her voice flat, her spectacles clownish, I thought, I have nothing to say to this woman. After Inge, and my brief addictive return to Bathsheba the dentist, I could not foresee pleasure in any woman, especially not one who had been victimised by her hairdresser. I thought, You can make the tea and I’ll joke with my old friends about the perils of a broken heart and then you shall all
three go home together happy in your good deed while I open a can of lentils and listen to ‘Science Now’ on the wireless.

Poor me. There’s nothing so sweet as wallowing in it is there? Wallowing is sex for depressives. I should remember my grandmother’s motto offered to the suffering as pastoral care. Not for her the painful dilemma, the agonised choice, ‘Either shit or get off the pot.’ That’s right. At least I was between turds.

Jacqueline made me a sandwich and asked if I had any washing-up I’d like done. She came the next day and the day after that. She told me all about the problems facing lemurs in the Zoo. She brought her own mop. She worked nine to five Monday to Friday, drove a Mini and got her reading from book clubs. She exhibited no fetishes, foibles, freak-outs or fuck-ups. Above all she was single and she had always been single. No children and no husband.

I considered her. I didn’t love her and I didn’t want to love her. I didn’t desire her and I could not imagine desiring her. These were all points in her favour. I had lately learned that another way of writing
FALL IN LOVE
is
WALK THE PLANK
. I was tired of balancing blindfold on a slender beam, one slip and into the unplumbed sea. I wanted the clichés, the armchair. I wanted the broad road and twenty-twenty vision. What’s wrong with that? It’s called growing up. Maybe most people gloss their comforts with a patina of romance but it soon wears off. They’re in it for the long haul; the expanding waistline and the little semi in the suburbs. What’s wrong with that? Late-night TV and snoring side by side into the millennium. Till death us do part. Anniversary darling? What’s wrong with that?

I considered her. She had no expensive tastes, knew
nothing about wine, never wanted to be taken to the opera and had fallen in love with me. I had no money and no morale. It was a marriage made in heaven.

We agreed that we were good for each other whilst sitting in her Mini eating a Chinese take-away. It was a cloudy night so we couldn’t look at the stars and besides, she had to be up for work at half past seven. I don’t think we even slept together that night. It was the next night, freezing cold in November and I’d lit the fire. I’d arranged a few flowers because I like to do that anyway but when it came to getting out the tablecloth and finding the good glasses I couldn’t be bothered. ‘We’re not like that,’ I told myself. ‘What we have is simple and ordinary. That’s why I like it. It’s worth lies in its neatness. No more sprawling life for me. This is container gardening.’

Over the months that followed my mind healed and I no longer moped and groaned over lost love and impossible choices. I had survived shipwreck and I liked my new island with hot and cold running water and regular visits from the milkman. I became an apostle of ordinariness. I lectured my friends on the virtues of the humdrum, praised the gentle bands of my existence and felt that for the first time I had come to know what everyone told me I would know; that passion is for holidays, not homecoming.

My friends were more circumspect than me. They regarded Jacqueline with a wary approval, regarding me as one might a mental patient who has been behaving for a few months. A few months? More like a year. I was rigorous, hard working and … and … what was that word beginning with B?

‘You’re bored,’ my friend said.

I protested with all the fervour of a teetotaller caught glancing at the bottle. I was content. I had settled down.

‘Still having sex?’

‘Not much. It doesn’t matter you know. We do now and then. When we both feel like it. We work hard. We don’t have a lot of time.’

‘Do you look at her and want her? Do you look at her and notice her?’

I lost my temper. Why was my happily settled, happily happy Heidi house coming under fire from a friend who had put up with all my broken hearts without a word of reproach? I struggled in my mind with all kinds of defences. Should I be hurt? Surprised? Should I laugh it off? I wanted to say something cruel to expiate my anger and to justify myself. But it’s difficult with old friends; difficult because it’s so easy. You know one another as well as lovers do and you have had less to pretend about. I poured myself a drink and shrugged.

‘Nothing’s perfect.’

The worm in the bud. So what? Most buds do have worms. You spray, you fuss, you hope the hole won’t be too big and you pray for sunshine. Just let the flower bloom and no-one will notice the ragged edges. I thought that about me and Jacqueline. I was desperate to tend us. I wanted the relationship to work for not very noble reasons; after all it was my last ditch. No more racing for me. She loved me too, yes she did, in her uncomplicated undemanding way. She never bothered me when I said, ‘Don’t bother me,’ and she didn’t cry when I shouted at her. In fact she shouted back. She treated me like a big cat in the Zoo. She was very proud of me.

My friend said, ‘Pick on someone your own size.’

And then I met Louise.

If I were painting Louise I’d paint her hair as a swarm
of butterflies. A million Red Admirals in a halo of movement and light. There are plenty of legends about women turning into trees but are there any about trees turning into women? Is it odd to say that your lover reminds you of a tree? Well she does, it’s the way her hair fills with wind and sweeps out around her head. Very often I expect her to rustle. She doesn’t rustle but her flesh has the moonlit shade of a silver birch. Would I had a hedge of such saplings naked and unadorned.

At first it didn’t matter. We got on well as a threesome. Louise was kind to Jacqueline and never tried to come between us even as a friend. In any case, why should she? She was happily married and had been so for ten years. I had met her husband, a doctor with just the right bedside manner, he was unremarkable but that is not a vice.

‘She’s very beautiful isn’t she?’ said Jacqueline.

‘Who?’

‘Louise.’

‘Yes, yes, I suppose she is if you like that sort of thing.’

‘Do you like that sort of thing?’

‘I like Louise yes. You know I do. So do you.’

‘Yes.’

She went back to her
World Wildlife
magazine and I went for a walk.

I was only going for a walk, any old walk, nowhere special walk, but I found myself outside Louise’s front door. Dear me. What am I doing here? I was going the other way.

I rang the bell. Louise answered. Her husband Elgin was in his study playing a computer game called
HOSPITAL
. You get to operate on a patient who shouts at you if you do it wrong.

‘Hello Louise. I was passing so I thought I might pop in.’

Pop in. What a ridiculous phrase. What am I, a cuckoo clock?

We went down the hall together. Elgin shot his head out of the study door. ‘Hello there. Hello, hello, very nice. Be with you, little problem with the liver, can’t seem to find it.’

In the kitchen Louise gave me a drink and a chaste kiss on the cheek. It would have been chaste if she’d taken her lips away at once, but instead she offered the obligatory peck and moved her lips imperceptibly over the spot. It took about twice as long as it should have done, which was still no time at all. Unless it’s your cheek. Unless you’re already thinking that way and wondering if someone else is thinking that way too. She gave no sign. I gave no sign. We sat and talked and listened to music and I didn’t notice the dark or the lateness of the hour or the bottle now empty or my stomach now empty. The phone rang, obscenely loud, we both jumped. Louise answered it in her careful way, listened a moment then passed it over to me. It was Jacqueline. She said, very sad, not reproachful, but sad, ‘I wondered where you were. It’s nearly midnight. I wondered where you were.’

‘I’m sorry. I’ll get a cab now. I’ll be with you soon.’

I stood up and smiled. ‘Can you get me a cab?’

‘I’ll drive you,’ she said. ‘It would be nice to see Jacqueline.’

We didn’t talk on the way back. The streets were quiet, there was nothing on the road. We pulled up outside my flat and I said thank you and we made an arrangement to meet for tea the following week and then she said, ‘I’ve got tickets for the opera tomorrow night. Elgin can’t come. Will you come?’

‘We’re supposed to be having a night in tomorrow.’

She nodded and I got out. No kiss.

What to do? Should I stay in with Jacqueline and hate it and start the slow motor of hating her? Should I make an excuse and go out? Should I tell the truth and go out? I can’t have it all my own way, relationships are about compromise. Give and take. Maybe I don’t want to stay in but she wants me to stay in. I should be glad to do that. It will make us stronger and sweeter. These were my thoughts as she slept beside me and if she had any fears she did not reveal them in those night-time hours. I looked at her lying trustfully in the spot where she had lain for so many nights. Could this bed be treacherous?

By morning I was bad tempered and exhausted. Jacqueline, ever cheerful, got into her mini and went to her mother’s. At noon she rang to ask me over. Her mother wasn’t well and she wanted to spend the night with her.

‘Jacqueline,’ I said. ‘Stay the night. We’ll see each other tomorrow.’

I felt reprieved and virtuous. Now I could sit in my own flat by myself and be pragmatic. Sometimes the best company is your own.

During the interval of
The Marriage of Figaro
I realised how often other people looked at Louise. On every side we were battered by sequins, dazed with gold. The women wore their jewellery like medals. A husband here, a divorce there, they were a palimpsest of love-affairs. The chokers, the brooch, the rings, the tiara, the studded watch that couldn’t possibly tell the time to anyone without a magnifying glass. The bracelets, the ankle-chains, the veil hung with seed pearls and the earrings that far outnumbered
the ears. All these jewels were escorted by amply cut grey suits and dashingly spotted ties. The ties twitched when Louise walked by and the suits pulled themselves in a little. The jewels glinted their own warning at Louise’s bare throat. She wore a simple dress of moss green silk, a pair of jade earrings, and a wedding ring. ‘Never take your eyes from that ring,’ I told myself. ‘Whenever you think you are falling remember that ring is molten hot and will burn you through and through.’