Four New Words for Love (11 page)

He notes, with renewed surprise, that he has slept only on his allotted side, despite having the mattress to himself. Solitude has not yet accustomed him to the expanse. With an automatic
gesture he retrieves his bedside glasses and the room swims into milky focus. He imagines himself on the other side of the gauze curtains, suspended above the dewy lawn, ascending like the truant
balloon. And in that retreat the context of his diminishing world would be revealed, like a child entering his address in an exercise book: suburban street, near London, England, Britain, the
World, the Solar System, the Milky Way, the Universe.

Movement is the order of the day. And it has become an order. The automatic transition of impulse to motion has gradually become a thing of the past. Now it requires the marshalling of forces.
‘And that’s another thing...’ Christopher says aloud to himself. The other thing is the previously invisible functions of his body which now clamour for attention. Previously
Christopher considered his body, if he considered it at all, to be like a seaworthy ocean liner. Provisions were taken on board and the rest saw to itself. The boilers were stoked, the propellers
turned, a multitude of things went on below decks, without supervision or consciousness, and the ship sailed stately on. Now the interior workings, with sighs, palpitations and eruptions, are
becoming vociferous.

With the momentum of habit Christopher locates his slippers, left parallel in readiness, slides his feet into them, and stands. Retrieving his dressing gown from the door hook he bends to tuck a
heel into the flattened pile of one slipper, and bangs his head on the knob.

‘Fuck.’

He is shocked. Where did that come from? ‘Fuck’ is not an item in his vocabulary, or Marjory’s, or the reactionary parts of the BBC he is accustomed to. It’s a word from
the world Marjory took pains to exclude, and now it has intruded.

He pads to the bathroom. Her merciless combination of reflective cabinet and fixed mirror give him back himself in unwanted detail. His hair lost its youthful vigour with its colour. Although
thinning, Christopher’s hairline has remained adamant; he does not sport the liver spotted scalp of his contemporaries, and the impression of abundance is only debunked at close quarters. The
Prussian haircuts of Marjory’s cajoling followed her to the grave. This new licence has nothing to do with vanity but absent-mindedness. Propelled in sleep by a mysterious static, the
untrapped portion radiates in unpredictable permutations. A penumbra is cast by the overhead light. The flattened section, stuck round the vicinity of his ear, forms a curious crop circle, giving
him the hallowed silhouette of a just struck match in a high cross-wind. He sits.

Twenty years ago Marjory would tut disapproval from the bedroom at the torrential noise, as he pumped a steaming arc down the toilet each morning. It was a small but satisfying rebellion to
direct the jet for maximum acoustics. And now, first thing, he sits to pee. There is now a hesitancy; his bladder has become inexplicably shy. After the first he is fine, but his last standing
early morning attempt coaxed a trickle over his slippers. And that’s another thing... There is also the issue of his bowels. Previously the mere act of getting up set in train the motions.
Now there are rumblings and issuings with little method and perilously brief forewarning; another rebellion below decks.

He purges himself, cleans, flushes, stands. He lets the dressing gown and pyjama top fall to the ground. Full nudity in this hall of mirrors is too gruesome a prospect. He is only fully naked
when condensation draws a veil. He runs a basin of warm water, lathers his face and pulls the shaving mirror on its extending bracket till his face shudders into view. He had been over-enthusiastic
and looks like a bespectacled polar bear. He swivels the mirror to its magnified side and notes, with macabre curiosity, fissures, broken veins, the wattle, stubble emerging from the foam like soot
on snow.

He shaves in long practical sweeps, rinses the basin and climbs into the bath. Turning on the shower he luxuriates under the warm cone, after all these years still childishly pleased with the
novelty of hot water on demand. Marjory has left a pumice stone, another small find, and he stands, stork like, forehead pressed against the tiles, water pleasurably cascading down his back while
he files the scurf from his heels. He climbs out and dries himself before the condensation clears, collects the bundle of clothes and returns to the bedroom. An astringent closes the pores on his
face. He dresses in a shirt and tie. Hound’s tooth trousers complement the leather carpet slippers. The dangling braces snap satisfactorily into place. Taking up two paddle-shaped brushes he
tames his hair with a cursory glance in the mirror.

‘Splendid. Splendid.’

This is repeated in a kind of litany as he goes downstairs to the kitchen. Contemplating the prospect of cereal or kipper, Christopher sits at the table and, stretching across, turns on the
radio. It’s an old fashioned set, a vestige of earlier times, shared with his mother that he refused to relinquish in the onslaught of Marjory’s improvements. A circular dial controls a
vertical stripe that drifts between wavebands calibrated with the names of foreign cities. He is floating in the ether between Budapest and Vladivostok, when a voice asserts itself through the
static. It is the shipping forecast, a catalogue of wind velocities, compass directions and quadrilaterals of sea incomprehensible to him. An image floats into his mind: Hebridean seamen shrouded
in gleaming oilskins, a pitching bow and tumultuous seas – and disappears as mysteriously as it arrived. A rich, plummy voice replaces the first, the comforting familiarity of received
pronunciation, concentric ripples of civilisation with the BBC at its epicentre. A second and third image are conjured: ragged expats sweating in pith helmets; sophisticates on a colonial veranda,
sipping sundowners beneath mesmerising revolutions of a slow fan. It’s the World Service. It’s the news. It’s five thirty a.m.

‘Splendid. Splendid,’ Christopher says as his forehead makes slow contact with the table, and he immediately falls asleep.

* * *

A list of stock-market prices, delivered in deadpan monotony, awaken him. For the second time in five hours he has to locate himself. He looks at the clock. Ten fifteen. The
image of a kipper pops up in his imagination like the displayed price in an old-fashioned till. His timing is perfection. The butter melts into the kipper, curling beneath the grill, as the poached
egg is scooped from the water. He completes the ensemble with toast and a pot of Earl Grey.

Fifteen minutes later he is walking in the direction of the newsagent. A cluster of small shops still face one another across the High Street, embattled remnants of the village purveyors he knew
as a child, till London came knocking. The bell announces his arrival. He prefers a less obtrusive entrance. Scanning the newspapers his eyes are drawn to the upper shelf. There is a young woman
whose breasts defy gravity. His scrutiny is curious, not prurient. Even the Edwardian corsetry that pre-dated his mother wouldn’t provide the superstructure for this display. Is it nutrition?
The bell rings again. From his peripheral vision he is aware that his glance vies with another. George Coleman is studying the same detail with quite a different expression. He turns to look at
Christopher in a sudden exchange of grubby complicity. The glance is gone as soon as it arrives. Christopher turns away. He doesn’t like George Coleman and feels contaminated by implication.
He buys his paper and retreats, exchanging a cursory nod with George as the bell rings him out. Both know this is an association George is keener on than Christopher. Christopher imagines that
George imagines some fraternity of louche outings.

The kitchen tap has developed a persistent slow drip, a water torture to calibrate suburban afternoons. Despite lacking all practical skills, Christopher takes a detour into the ironmongers,
regretting his decision as the aproned figure turns to serve him. The young man of contagious gusto is intermittently replaced by the old man of corrosive cynicism. Christopher has seen enough
cynicism in his life. He came here more for the pleasure of the chat than the need for washers. Enthusiasm is a draught. And there’s another reason why he dislikes the old man: he’s a
veteran bigot, who treats Christopher with the reverence of a belligerent drill-sergeant for an officer who exemplifies the callousness he’s trying to instil. God knows, Christopher has given
him no cause. He shares none of his opinions, but that doesn’t seem to matter. It’s a trend Christopher notices in those around him who have reached a similar age: they presuppose a
common pool of shared prejudices.

Mrs Griggs has visited during his absence. All evidence of the kipper is gone. A salad beneath clingfilm has appeared in the fridge. He tears chunks of wholemeal bread and eats with relish, vine
tomatoes popping like party balloons in his mouth as he scans the letters page. After lunch he takes a soft chair and turns on the television. Christopher watches the cavalcade in bewilderment. His
chin touches his chest.

He wakes with a start, silences the television and makes for the kitchen. The wall linking kitchen to dining room has been knocked through, the only one of Marjory’s improvements he agreed
with. The room has pleasing, spacious proportions. The rear wall is glass, French windows leading on to a patio with two steps descending to the accommodating privacy of the long narrow garden.
It’s early evening, perhaps seven, and glorious. The shadows are lengthening. He walks out to the perfume of cut grass. The adjacent garden has an oak placed just so, to filter sunlight for
the benefit of anyone standing here, at this time of night, at this time of year, with the earth and sun standing in these relations, a configuration he can almost believe got up for his
appreciation. Insects mill in the diagonal beams. The accumulated beauty strikes him like a blow. He breathes ten times, twenty, and looks at his feet as if expecting to find something has sloughed
off.

He returns inside. The structure of his day has revolved round the purchase of a newspaper and senile naps. The structure of his life folded like wet cardboard on his wife’s departure, and
it’s not as if he can blame this on deranged grief. Was the seed of apathy always there? He sits for a moment at the kitchen table, taking stock, dredging memories like strata. A tender
child, with a tender mother, taken absurdly early at a tender age. Which age, Christopher thinks, until the abstraction of senility, isn’t tender? The rapid instars of teens and adolescence.
The groping hesitancy of excruciating courtship. Marriage. The career trajectory that flattened before achieving the degree of respectability his wife craved. Disappointment generally: with work,
that wasn’t quite going to improve the world by even the subtlest of increments; with a marriage that seemed to petrify once the rings were on; with the vicarious frustration of his
wife’s thwarted social ambitions, left consciously at his feet to augment his own disillusionment. His growing detachment. Resignation to fate and the intermittent consolation this affords.
Marjory’s death.

He looks again at the day’s newspaper and scans it with morbid fascination. He can’t remember a single thing. In a corner, in a pile denied the cleaner, stands a column of folded
newspapers, bundled and tied in readiness for recycling, daily strata of history. He can’t remember any of that either. He can’t look at any theme in the top copy and tease its
antecedents from the stack. His daily paper might as well go from shop to pile and cut out the middle man. And yet it wasn’t always like this. Evidence of past acuity is everywhere: in the
marginalia of books strewn around and tidied by the cleaner. Two weeks ago he had prised one from the shelves and been surprised by the shy annotations in his handwriting: aides-memoires he
couldn’t remember writing to texts he couldn’t remember reading. The world is being run by a generation younger than him for the benefit of a population younger still. Age is a
cul-de-sac, a high tide that deposits few on a less populous shore.

It was always assumed by both that Christopher would go first. Their financial, and her social arrangements, were based on this assumption. The accumulated insurance on his life would have
rebuilt a small hotel. In insisting on these arrangements she’d been swayed not so much by actuarial tables, but her envisaged widowhood, which was more of the same really but without him:
whist drives, coffee mornings, bridge evenings and other outings of that ilk that Christopher had been methodically excluded from in the expectation that she’d have to go it alone anyway. It
suited him.

In the light of what happened Christopher wondered if her involvement with the church was providential or ironic. She flirted with the superstructure and left dogma alone. He remembers her
annual anxiety, in the atmosphere of seething competitiveness attending harvest thanksgiving and idly wondering if she believed in God, or had even considered the question, or if divinity even
mattered. That had proved a watershed, prompting him to scrutinise his own soul. And all he found, in the place of conviction, was habit. ‘I have doubts,’ he had confessed to her.
‘Don’t you have doubts?’ But Marjory never had doubts, not of that kind. And being in a state of doubt, he went on to explain, was not being in a state of grace, and he refused
further to compromise himself by sceptical attendance.