Four New Words for Love (12 page)

‘They’re not all saints.’ She said. ‘I’m sure the C of E is big enough to accommodate doubts.’ She said. ‘Look at Thomas.’

‘But he
was
a saint.’

She knew when to hector and when to retreat, and the tone of his doubts left her in no doubt. So she visited her priest and word got around. Other husbands might languish at home, in spiritual
ignorance, or wash their cars with pagan indifference. That wasn’t the absence of the apostate. She changed her demeanour: Marjory of the husband who had doubts.

Her stock rose. And then came the fateful day.

She returned, stiff-legged in shock. Dr Twidell, an unimaginative man wholly dependent on a limited repertoire of patented drugs, appeared as shocked as she was. Drawing forth tonight’s
star prize from the buff coloured envelope, unsuspected and imminent death, he steeled himself to deliver the prognosis. The question of remediation was deferred; news of hopelessness could be
foisted on the locum when Marjory mustered sufficiently to ask.

But she never asked. She tottered home between suburban hedgerows and glowing pavements, to sit dazed in the sundrenched lounge as dandelion seeds floated past the bay window, like motes of
accountable time, and tried to apprehend the scope of a lifetime that made nonsense of her new shoes. She imagined her accessories, charitable confetti, sprinkled over unappreciative single mothers
on a council estate.

Christopher had to obtain the news from the hapless locum as Dr Twidell sliced on the fourth. His attempts at consoling his wife elicited a snort. He sought reinforcements. The priest made the
mistake of an appeal to her spiritual side. A hackneyed attempt to relegate affairs to the context of eternity, of situating this departure in the boundless reunion to come, conjured in
Christopher’s mind the horror of a never-ending bridge evening. Who knows what it conjured in hers. She gave another snort and turned her face to the wall. There was no bigger picture, only
that framed in the bay: the sun-drenched garden and beyond that the world that callously continued to rotate. She climbed the stairs for the last time, to bury herself among accoutrements that had
lost all consolation and value. A week later she suffered a facial palsy, and behind this furious mask raged at Christopher’s superfluous health, as he plumped her pillows and removed the tea
tray. This accusatory glare followed him around the room for another week, till she suffered another stroke. He phoned from her room and, turning, noticed the change in her eyes. He sat on the bed
and held her hand while the ambulance threaded its way. Behind the mask the moist eyes swivelled in bewilderment and began to leak. She gripped his hand spasmodically, and tried to articulate
something. Venom? Affection? Reconciliation? Atonement? A lifetime of getting on, of climbing up, of things and people strategically ignored or cultivated, of things unsaid, boiled down to the
travesty of two ambiguous grunts. It appeared that Marjory finally had doubts.

The congregation was smaller than he expected but select enough to obtain her posthumous approval. Several of the ladies said so. Christopher believed they were impersonating a crowd. He saw the
empty pews as an indictment.

He had been alone for a week when he realised how rigorous her preparations had been, anticipating herself in his role. A cleaning lady called two mornings, and one unpredictable afternoon a
week. She had her own key. Dust never settled. The contents of his washing basket emptied itself and fresh shirts appeared, stacked like bricks. Surfaces silently shone. The rumple of bedclothes
pulled itself taut. A gardener appeared from the shrubbery. He also had a key, to the shed, and wielded his implements with a proprietorial air. Weeds were as absent from the flower beds as coffee
rings from the occasional tables. Order reigned in Marjory’s fiefdom, starting from the garden gate. He felt like a tenant occupying the premises of an absentee landlord. She would have lived
in this antiseptic environment with the wherewithal to realise her social ambitions. But she had died, and he had not. Given the modesty of his requirements he found he was sitting on a small
volcano of cash, erratically spewing cheques, as policies, long forgotten, matured.

Despite the self-absorption he had defensively withdrawn into he found he was curiously unprepared for the solitude that fell in lieu of dust. Her ambitions and activities, sometimes the
avoidance of them, had been the armature that supported his routine. With her gone, the day sagged. ‘I had ambitions,’ he says to the furniture. ‘I had a life. Why have I allowed
this to happen?’ The sterile surfaces reproach with their silence. He knows he did not subordinate his ambitions to hers, they never wanted the same thing. He allowed them to perish.

‘I am not poor. I am not unhealthy.’

If anything is to mean anything he must connect.

Christopher’s view of history, with extensive if eclectic reading, is of a vista of past atrocities. History is populated with the disgraces of human behaviour: ancient persecutions,
mediaeval cruelty, sweeping barbaric hordes, all of these things merely lacking the refinement that advances have now lent that nasty predisposition of certain natures. Membership of the wrong
tribe, or no membership at all, has proved fatal. Belief in the wrong thing, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, or even belief in nothing at all has supplied unfortunate people with the
credentials to be horribly extinguished in their masses. He sees himself, standing on the pinnacle of the present tense, looking back on a soggy plain. The dry spots are pockets of safety,
outnumbered by the morass of cruelty. From his eyrie it’s a ghastly mosaic. In his less jovial moments he has been given to wonder if the aggregate of human history contains more grief than
joy, or did people just get by – like him. The trick is to negotiate history dry shod, which is what he’s done, through no effort on his part. He hasn’t been called upon, his
mettle hasn’t been tested, which, when he thinks about it, makes him feel a number of things: relief, guilt, and sometimes a vague sense of shame when he has found himself unhappy, well fed
and stable, when the television pours out daily grief, and the posthumous chorus of all the countless who got a rawer deal echoes up through the cistern of the past.

He walks out on the terrace. It’s as dark as it will become. The night has a narcotic stillness. Christopher calculates the junction of both diagonals, takes possession of the long
rectangle of the garden, and inspects his strip of metropolitan sky.

As a child he believed that the space above the garden belonged to his parents, as did the grass on which he stood, that space was carved into allotments and theirs was a column of air,
attenuating to a tiny point, like converging rails into a flat horizon. He had tried to make some kind of order on the capricious scattering of stars by studying a children’s astronomy book.
Pages as thick as cardboard superimposed creatures and things, linking random points of light. Even then he had thought the selection arbitrary. Those images had faded from memory as their
co-ordinates continued to burn. His abiding memory was of poring over these books, the creaking pages balanced on his mother’s lap, during that interval of bed-time intimacy, when she read
him to sleep. She furnished what scant commentary her knowledge could provide, inspired by the captions, with almost the same reverential tone she used when instructing him in his prayers. But she
also spoke extempore, telling him of the time before telescopes, when people believed the earth was the centre of everything and everything circled round us, like ripples in a pool when you throw a
stone, or the concentric skins of an onion. And she told him that these people believed everything was so perfectly balanced in this mechanism that heavenly music came from the harmony of the
spheres. It was the simpler explanation that seduced him. How could harmony not envelope us when he had had a foretaste in the drowsy enclosure of his mother’s arms? The evocation of her
scent so impregnated his memory that he lived his whole life with the subconscious illusion that the vast distances of space were informed with the smell of lily of the valley, and the resonance of
music too beautiful for us to hear.

* * *

Christopher has found a dog and lost a cleaner. The discipline of these new days starts with an early morning constitutional round the common, observing the clockwise etiquette
of other like-minded individuals. And he is drawn there in the evenings too, by the fragrance of gathering dusk. He can still remember the annual fairs. Now he doesn’t linger longer than the
sun, as the place turns sinister in the space of ten minutes. Shouts penetrate the dark, and ponds of lamplight are bisected by hooded teenagers on unlit bikes. It was on such an outing, last week,
having outstayed prudence, that he came across the dog sitting dead centre in the lamp light, an aimless bull’s eye. It wasn’t young, or pitifully thin. It wore no collar but gave off a
slightly forlorn aura. His hesitating interest was enough of an invitation. He was only alerted to the fact that it was following him by their projected shadows. He turned with no intention of
shooing it away. If he took it was he depriving the sinister nocturnal visitors to the common of a mascot? He is debating the point when the sight of its leathery testicles resting on the ground
decides him.

He took it home and fed it some salami. Suddenly drained he raids the linen cupboard to manufacture a nest on the kitchen floor, which the dog occupies for fifteen minutes, before ticking its
way up the stairs to lie on the bed across his tired legs. In the eerie half-light he finds his glasses and confronts the dog’s blank retinas, reflecting back the sodium glare from the street
beyond. They regard one another unblinkingly for several seconds till he leans forward to tousle its head. The compact is made. They fall into separate dreams.

The blanket that the dog spurned is lying portentously next to the washing machine, next morning, as Christopher and the dog come down for a late breakfast. Washing is never left in sight, one
of the functions, like a healthy digestion, that goes unnoticed below decks. Mrs Griggs enters from the garden with the theatricality of a stage entrance, and stands in pointed stupefaction to
labour her point. Mrs Griggs is never in the garden. It’s not her domain. Mrs Griggs is ages with Marjory. By a deft inversion she had succeeded in making him ashamed of being her employer.
The quantifiable effects of her dusting and scrubbing made his Civil Service scribblings seem hopelessly speculative. Since Marjory’s death she has appointed herself guardian of the effects.
Pretending to link cause to effect, she looks at the dog and picks several hairs from the blanket. The dog walks between them to the sunny terrace and pisses on the shrubs.

‘I wouldn’t have no truck with a dog in my house.’ He confronts this with silence. She isn’t satisfied. ‘Not me y’wouldn’t. Not in my house.’

‘Yes. But it’s not your house. It’s my house.’ The words seem to come from somewhere else.

‘Mrs Fabian wouldn’t have liked it.’

‘She’s no longer here to consult.’

She flinches perceptibly. He relents. She senses the advantage.

‘I don’t know about dogs.’

Is this, he wonders, some kind of litany? It’s a tendency he’s noticed with stupid people, and politicians, to hope to prevail simply by repeating the same thing. With the argument
on his side he’s been caught flat-footed before by belligerent perseverance. It was a technique Marjory perfected, assessing which arguments she could win by attrition. Past slights stiffen
his resolve.

‘If you mean you don’t understand dogs then there’s nothing
to
understand. I’m not asking you to accept responsibility. I’ll look after him. If you mean
you’re unwilling to work in a house with a dog then that’s your prerogative.’

‘What d’y’mean?’

He rubs his eyes, imagining a blackboard syllogism with him pointing: you won’t work in a house with a dog; this house has a dog; you won’t work in this house. Good fucking riddance.
The last sentence comes as a surprise to him again. She deserves civility.

‘Look –’

‘You didn’t employ me.
She
did.’ She points upwards, the bedroom, the firmament, he’s too tired of this conversation to guess. Perhaps, Christopher thinks, she
has her own blackboard syllogism: I won’t have no trucks with dogs here; here is a dog; you and the dog will have to go. He has a momentary image of her as the manic housekeeper in
Rebecca
, returning to find her hysterically clutching Marjory’s artefacts as the burning timbers crash down around her.

‘She did take you on. And should you choose to remain,
we
,’ patting the dog for emphasis, ‘will be glad to have you. If it’s a question of money...’

‘It’s not money.’ The tone is almost contemptuous. ‘Yours isn’t the only house needs cleaning. I gave them up. I don’t need to clean anyone’s home. I
did it for her.’

He closes his eyes to rub them again and when he looks up she’s gone. A pair of rubber gloves lie flaccid on the draining board to mark her passing, this pantomime evaporation somehow in
keeping with this singularly unreal person.

Half an hour later he’s at the wine merchant in the high street. A worried glance from the assistant prompts him to leave the dog outside. Marjory’s taste latterly evolved to an
occasional glass of gaseous Lambrusco. She mistrusted anything that loosened self-control. She enjoyed disliking this shop, making his browsing a pleasureless affair. He orders a case of white
burgundy, another of claret, and delights the assistant by giving him carte-blanche to compose a third. They will be delivered that very afternoon. On impulse he lifts a bottle of Pinot Noir and a
box of Coronas from the humidor, another habit Marjory disapproved of. The occasional Christmas gift that escaped her embargo was smoked in the kitchen, crouching beneath the extractor hood,
sucking up the perfume of Havana.

He decants the delivery that afternoon, bottles randomly littering the kitchen surfaces in pleasing confusion. He takes a cigar to the terrace. From the first fragrant puff he knows this will
deliver what it promises. Marjory never did. He recalls their trysting days, turning the bend in the top landing of her parents’ house. Her bedroom door half ajar, her topless reflection
arresting him as the sound of placing cutlery wafts up from below, the right-angled collision of their gaze as her eyes meet his in the tilted glass and she glances downwards, directing his
scrutiny to her coffee-coloured nipples. Look, she seemed to be saying, these are only for you, as she made an unseen motion with her foot and slowly closed the door, bringing down the curtain on
the promise of carnality – never honoured. Given she didn’t care for intimacy, he was surprised and saddened by the lengths she would go to, tending her appearance for half
strangers.