Written on the Body (4 page)

‘What are you looking at?’ said Louise.

‘You bloody idiot,’ said my friend. ‘Another married woman.’

Louise and I were talking about Elgin.

‘He was born an Orthodox Jew,’ she said. ‘He feels put upon and superior at the same time.’

Elgin’s mother and father still lived in a 1930s semi in Stamford Hill. They had squatted it during the war and made a deal with the Cockney family who eventually came home to find the locks changed and a sign on the parlour door saying
SABBATH
.
KEEP OUT
. That was Friday night 1946. On Saturday night 1946 Arnold and Betty Small came face to face with Esau and Sarah Rosenthal. Money changed hands, or to be more precise, a certain amount of gold, and the Smalls went on to bigger things. The Rosenthals opened a chemist shop and refused to serve any Liberal or Reformed Jews.

‘We are God’s chosen people,’ they said, meaning themselves.

From such humble, arrogant beginnings, Elgin was born. They had intended to call him Samuel but, while she was pregnant, Sarah visited the British Museum and,
unmoved by the Mummies, came at last to the glory that was Greece. This need not have affected the destiny of her son but Sarah developed serious complications during her fourteen-hour labour and it seemed that she would die. Sweating and delirious, her head twisting from side to side, she could only repeat over and over again the single word
ELGIN
. Esau, drawn and down at heel, twisting his prayer shawl beneath his black coat, had a superstitious side. If that were his wife’s last word then surely it should mean something, become something. And so the word was made flesh. Samuel became Elgin and Sarah did not die. She lived to produce thousands of gallons of chicken soup and whenever she ladled it into the bowl she said, ‘Elgin, Jehovah spared me to serve you.’

And so Elgin grew up thinking that the world ought to serve him and hating the dark counter in his father’s little shop and hating being set apart from the other boys but wanting it more than anything.

‘You’re nothing, you’re dust,’ said Esau. ‘Raise yourself up and be a man.’

Elgin won a scholarship to an Independent school. He was small, narrow-chested, short-sighted and ferociously clever. Unfortunately his religion excluded him from Saturday games and whilst he managed to avoid persecution he courted isolation. He knew he was better than those square-shouldered upright beauty queens whose good looks and easy manners commanded affection and respect. Besides, they were all queer, and Elgin had seen them grappling one another, mouths open, cocks hard. No-one tried to touch him.

He fell in love with Louise when she beat him in single combat at the Debating Society finals. Her school was only a mile away from his and he had to walk past
it on the way home. He took to walking past it at just the time when Louise was leaving. He was gentle with her, he tried hard, he didn’t show off, he wasn’t sarcastic. She had only been in England for a year and it was cold. They were both refugees and they found comfort in each other. Then Elgin went to Cambridge, choosing a college outstanding for its sporting prowess. Louise, arriving a year later, had just begun to suspect him of being a masochist. This was confirmed when he lay on his single bed, legs apart, and begged her to scaffold his penis with bulldog clips.

‘I can take it,’ he said. ‘I’m going to be a doctor.’

Meanwhile, at home in Stamford Hill, Esau and Sarah, locked in prayer through the twenty-four hours of the Sabbath, wondered what would happen to their boy who had fallen into the clutches of a flame-haired temptress.

‘She’ll ruin him,’ said Esau, ‘he’s doomed. We’re all doomed.’

‘My boy, my boy,’ said Sarah. ‘And only five feet seven.’

They didn’t attend the wedding held in a Registry Office in Cambridge. How could they when Elgin had arranged it for a Saturday? There was Louise in an ivory silk flapper dress with a silver headband. Her best friend Janet holding a camera and the rings. Elgin’s best friend whose name he couldn’t remember. Elgin, in a hired morning suit just a size too tight.

‘You see,’ said Louise, ‘I knew he was safe, that I could control him, that I would be the one in charge.’

‘And what about him, what did he think?’

‘He knew I was beautiful, that I was a prize. He wanted something showy but not vulgar. He wanted to go up to the world and say, “Look what I’ve got.” ’

I thought about Elgin. He was very eminent, very dull, very rich. Louise charmed everyone. She brought him attention, contacts, she cooked, she decorated, she was clever and above all she was beautiful. Elgin was awkward and he didn’t fit. There was a certain amount of racism in the way he was treated. His colleagues were mostly those young men he had been taught with and inwardly despised. He knew other Jews of course, but in his profession they were all comfortable, cultured, liberal. They weren’t Orthodox from Stamford Hill with nothing but a squatted semi between themselves and the gas chamber. Elgin never talked about his past, and gradually, with Louise beside him, it became irrelevant. He too became comfortable and cultivated and liberal. He went to the opera and he bought antiques. He made jokes about Frummers and matzos and even lost his accent. When Louise encouraged him to get in touch with his parents he sent them a Christmas card.

‘It’s her,’ said Esau behind the dark counter. ‘A curse on women since the sin of Eve.’

And Sarah, polishing, sorting, mending, serving, felt the curse and lost herself a little more.

‘Hello Elgin,’ I said as he came into the kitchen in his navy blue corduroys (size M) and his off-duty Viyella shirt (size S). He leaned against the stove and fired a staccato of questions at me. That was his preferred method of conversation; it meant he didn’t have to expose himself.

Louise was chopping vegetables. ‘Elgin’s going away next week,’ she said, cutting through his flow as deftly as he would a windpipe.

‘That’s right, that’s right,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Got a paper to give in Washington. Ever been to Washington?’
Tuesday the twelfth of May 10.40. British Airways flight to Washington cleared for take-off. There’s Elgin in Club Class with his glass of champagne and his headphones on listening to Wagner. Bye Bye Elgin.

Tuesday the twelfth of May 1 pm. Knock Knock.

‘Who’s there?’

‘Hello Louise.’

She smiled. ‘Just in time for lunch.’

Is food sexy?
Playboy
regularly features stories about asparagus and bananas and leeks and courgettes or being smeared with honey or chocolate chip ice-cream. I once bought some erotic body oil, authentic Pina Colada flavour, and poured it over myself but it made my lover’s tongue come out in a rash.

Then there are candle-lit dinners and those leering waistcoated waiters with outsize pepperpots. There are, too, simple picnics on the beach which only work when you’re in love because otherwise you couldn’t bear the sand in the brie. Context is all, or so I thought, until I started eating with Louise.

When she lifted the soup spoon to her lips how I longed to be that innocent piece of stainless steel. I would gladly have traded the blood in my body for half a pint of vegetable stock. Let me be diced carrot, vermicelli, just so that you will take me in your mouth. I envied the French stick. I watched her break and butter each piece, soak it slowly in her bowl, let it float, grow heavy and fat, sink under the deep red weight and then be resurrected to the glorious pleasure of her teeth.

The potatoes, the celery, the tomatoes, all had been under her hands. When I ate my own soup I strained to
taste her skin. She had been here, there must be something of her left. I would find her in the oil and onions, detect her through the garlic. I knew that she spat in the frying pan to determine the readiness of the oil. It’s an old trick, every chef does it, or did. And so I knew when I asked her what was in the soup that she had deleted the essential ingredient. I will taste you if only through your cooking.

She split a pear; one of her own pears from the garden. Where she lived had been an orchard once and her particular tree was two hundred and twenty years old. Older than the French Revolution. Old enough to have fed Wordsworth and Napoleon. Who had gone into this garden and plucked the fruit? Did their hearts beat as hard as mine? She offered me half a pear and a piece of Parmesan cheese. Such pears as these have seen the world, that is they have stayed still and the world has seen them. At each bite burst war and passion. History was rolled in the pips and the frog-coloured skin.

She dribbled viscous juices down her chin and before I could help her wiped them away. I eyed the napkin; could I steal it? Already my hand was creeping over the tablecloth like something out of Poe. She touched me and I yelped.

‘Did I scratch you?’ she said, all concern and remorse.

‘No, you electrocuted me.’

She got up and put on the coffee. The English are very good at those gestures.

‘Are we going to have an affair?’ she said.

She’s not English, she’s Australian.

‘No, no we’re not,’ I said. ‘You’re married and I’m with Jacqueline. We’re going to be friends.’

She said, ‘We’re friends already.’

Yes we are and I do like to pass the day with you in serious and inconsequential chatter. I wouldn’t mind washing up beside you, dusting beside you, reading the back half of the paper while you read the front. We are friends and I would miss you, do miss you and think of you very often. I don’t want to lose this happy space where I have found someone who is smart and easy and who doesn’t bother to check her diary when we arrange to meet. All the way home I told myself these things and these things were the solid pavement beneath my feet and the neat clipped hedges and the corner shop and Jacqueline’s car. Everything in its place; the lover, the friend, the life, the set. At home the breakfast cups are where we left them and I know, even if I close my eyes, the exact spot of Jacqueline’s pyjamas. I used to think that Christ was wrong, impossibly hard, when he said that to imagine committing adultery was just as bad as doing it. But now, standing here in this familiar unviolated space, I have already altered my world and Jacqueline’s world for ever. She doesn’t know this yet. She doesn’t know that there is today a revision of the map. That the territory she thought was hers has been annexed. You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so how could we take it back without asking?

I welcomed the quiet hours of late afternoon. No-one would disturb me, I could make smoky tea and sit in my usual place and hope that the wisdom of objects would make some difference to me. Here, surrounded by my tables and chairs and books, I would surely see the need to stay in one place. I had been an emotional nomad for too long. Hadn’t I come here weak and bruised to put a fence round the space Louise now threatened?

Oh Louise, I’m not telling the truth. You aren’t threatening me, I’m threatening myself. My careful well-earned life means nothing. The clock was ticking. I thought, How long before the shouting starts? How long before the tears and accusations and the pain? That specific stone in the stomach pain when you lose something you haven’t got round to valuing? Why is the measure of love loss?

This prelude and forethought is not unusual but to admit it is to cut through our one way out; the grand excuse of passion. You had no choice, you were swept away. Forces took you and possessed you and you did it but now that’s all in the past, you can’t understand etc etc. You want to start again etc etc. Forgive me. In the late twentieth century we still look to ancient daemons to explain our commonest action. Adultery is very common. It has no rarity value and yet at an individual level it is explained away again and again as a UFO. I can’t lie to myself in quite that way any more. I always did but not now. I know exactly what’s happening and I know too that I am jumping out of this plane of my own free will. No, I don’t have a parachute, but worse, neither does Jacqueline. When you go you take one with you.

I cut a slice of fruit bread. If in doubt eat. I can understand why for some people the best social worker is the fridge. My usual confessional is a straight Macallan but not before 5 o’clock. Perhaps that’s why I try and have my crises in the evening. Well, here I am at half past four with fruit bread and a cup of tea and instead of taking hold of myself I can only think of taking hold of Louise. It’s the food that’s doing it. There could not be a more unromantic moment than this and yet the yeasty smell of raisins and rye is exciting me more than any
Playboy
banana. It’s only a matter of time. Is it nobler to struggle
for a week before flying out the door or should I go and get my toothbrush now? I am drowning in inevitability.

I phoned a friend whose advice was to play the sailor and run a wife in every port. If I told Jacqueline I’d ruin everything and for what? If I told Jacqueline I’d hurt her beyond healing and did I have that right? Probably I had nothing more than dog-fever for two weeks and I could get it out of my system and come home to my kennel.

Good sense. Common sense. Good dog.

What does it say in the tea-leaves? Nothing but a capital L.

When Jacqueline came home I kissed her and said, ‘I wish you didn’t smell of the Zoo.’

She looked surprised. ‘I can’t help it. Zoos are smelly places.’

She went immediately to run a bath. I gave her a drink thinking how I disliked her clothes and the way she switched on the radio as soon as she got in.

Grimly I began to prepare our dinner. What would we do this evening? I felt like a bandit who hides a gun in his mouth. If I spoke I would reveal everything. Better not to speak. Eat, smile, make space for Jacqueline. Surely that was right?

The phone rang. I skidded to get it, closing the bedroom door behind me.

It was Louise.

‘Come over tomorrow,’ she said. ‘There’s something I want to tell you.’

‘Louise, if it’s to do with today, I can’t … you see, I’ve decided I can’t. That is I couldn’t because, well what if, you know …’

The phone clicked and went dead. I stared at it the way Lauren Bacall does in those films with Humphrey Bogart. What I need now is a car with a running board and a pair of fog lights. I could be with you in ten minutes Louise. The trouble is that all I’ve got is a Mini belonging to my girlfriend.