Four New Words for Love (29 page)

Two days later he follows this with a visit to his solicitor to instruct on the terms of his codicil.

He decides to confront her head on.

‘I hope you won’t be angry with me.’

‘Last time you said that Mum arrived. She’s not coming back?’

‘God no!’ The shudder dispels his awkwardness for the instant it lasts. ‘I’ll come straight to the point. I’m old. You’re young. My wife is dead. I have no
dependents. I want you to stay for as long as you want without you feeling you have to stay out of a sense of obligation. I wanted to put some wind in your sails. You always have a place here as
long as I’m here, and it’s yours when I’m not here anymore. By that I don’t mean moving out or emigrating or anything...’

‘I know what you mean.’

‘The thing is’

But she has abruptly interrupted him by standing and walking out. She goes up to her room to think. The dog follows. She sits on the floor, back to the bureau, stroking the dog beside her as she
tries to digest what she’s just heard. She’s trying to comprehend the extent of her indebtedness to him, not just for this latest thing but for everything. Even before this she knows
she couldn’t adequately repay him for the restoration of herself. The seriousness of this is too great and she finds herself taking inventory. She thinks about Nick, useless, vain, flimsy
Nick, that stick-on transparency of a man. Perhaps he unintentionally established a prototype in her mind or perhaps her dad had already done that. She knows she hasn’t experienced a fair
cross-section to generalise, but it doesn’t prevent her. Besides her dad there is the limitless succession of Lolly’s admirers. Simon was the best of a limited lot, and he didn’t
even have the courage of his inclinations. She’s experienced or met the kind of man who fertilises, or in Simon’s case doesn’t, and runs. They’ve all been disposable. She
can admit to herself now that all along she’s held a low opinion of men. None of them remotely stacks up. Except him, sitting downstairs, probably bewildered at her reaction and wondering if
he’s done a good thing or not, or if he should come upstairs and offer some tea, his only reaction when he’s emotionally out his depth.

What’s so difficult to accept is the event that would have to happen for her to come into all this. In her mind it’s impossible to disassociate him from this house. And this house
without him is unthinkable. She sees an image of herself, face down, the top half of her body sticking out from under the front doorstep, the rest of the masonry bearing down on her back.
He’s worked himself up to this and she’s walked out. She might have hurt him. She knows there’s nothing she can begin to say. There isn’t any combination of words, or any
that she can think of that comes close. She drags herself to the top landing. He appears at the bottom with the wobbling cup. She bursts into tears and sits on the top step. He makes his way up,
tea slopping into the saucer at each creak of the treads. He sits beside her. The dog insinuates itself between them yet again.

‘Deed’s done,’ he says. ‘Papers are signed. Welcome to the middle classes. Can’t say it’s ever made me any happier.’

* * *

It is her second summer in the house. When she returns from work she shouts through to the back garden, imperiously summoning him upstairs. He’s building the charcoal in
a conical pile. They have this arrangement now timed so she can walk onto the terrace to glowing embers and start their meal. He dusts his hands ineffectually, one against the other, as he goes
upstairs. She’s in the top hall taking something out of a Boots bag.

‘I’ve always had Lolly around at every crisis in my life. She’s not here. You’ll have to do. Wait here.’

She goes into the toilet. Rustling. A pause.

‘I can’t, with you listening.’

‘I should point out that you asked me up. I’ve no desire to listen to your functions. I’ll go downstairs.’

‘No. Wait.’ The noise of a woman pissing that Marjory tried so very very hard to conceal. Now the tap and not before. She comes out and stands beside him as he tries to grasp the
significance of the blue line.

‘I’m not sure I understand.’

‘For God’s sake, Christopher! It’s a home pregnancy test kit.’

‘I understand that. And I can guess what the line means. Is it an accident?’

‘No.’

‘Did you want this to happen?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was it deliberate?’

‘Yes.’

He puffs like a stranded fish for three exhalations before the obvious question. ‘Who?’

‘The boy next door.’

‘Literally?’ For one dreadful moment Oscar appeared in his mind as a candidate, before being replaced by the two boys, equally fertile.

‘Literally.’

‘Which one?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Of course it does. He has responsibilities.’

‘He’s a child. He’s a nice boy and in time he’ll meet a nice girl. He doesn’t know.’

‘He will.’

‘He’ll know that. He won’t necessarily know it’s him.’

More baffled breathing. ‘Where? How?’

‘You’ve met Lolly. She’s got a gift for improvisation in these things.’ He remembers the balcony kiss. ‘The weather’s been good. I just imagined how
she’d go about it and did the same, minus the precautions. And there was all the time you’ve been out at Vanessa’s.’

‘It all sounds a bit clinical.’

‘I got what I wanted. Don’t worry, Christopher, it’s good stock. Look at that family. Look at the parents. It’ll dilute the genes on my side.’

‘You can’t mean that. He might
want
to know.’

‘If he comes up to me and asks I won’t lie.’

‘He gave you a gift.’

No, she thinks, he didn’t give me a gift. He just did what they all do. What we all do. That dance. That itch the unborn make us scratch just to keep this show on the road. You,
Christopher, gave me the courage to ante up again, to want to try, to have a place, to keep
my
show on the road. You, Christopher, you gave me a gift.

* * *

Christopher is on the common with the dog. He could calibrate the day by the foot traffic. Give him a snapshot of the people and he’ll guess the time. Early morning are
the vigorous employed who walk faster than their loitering pets and stand vigilant with poised plastic bags over shitting dogs. After nine are the young mothers, supervised crocodiles of nursery
children and the elderly. The unemployed emerge around noon and sleep off their indoor complexions in the long grass. Three until four thirty the successions of children as the schools stagger
their release. Then a miscellany: older children with kit bags crossing the grass after practice; an elderly couple, touchingly congenial with library books; a belated nursery teacher, vexed as she
searches the grass for something valuable dropped. Around seven or seven thirty the same vigorous employed appear with new plastic bags and the same pets, dogs costive through the long day,
bursting with energy and more shit. And at any time after school the ball kickers, hide and seekers, kissers, promenaders.

The turning of the light is later each evening. Sometimes he loiters for the cavalcade and the spectacle of dusk. She understands. Either they’ll eat early or late. Today he left before
the evening news. She’ll delay the dinner until his return and their visitor arrives. The workers are out for their evening constitutional. Half a dozen ball games are going on in adjacent
stretches of green. There are vigorous shouts, different people encouraging different people kicking different balls, groans and burst of laughter. It’s intoxicating.

He sees George. He’s seen him before, on the opposite side of the High Street, gliding past on occasional buses and once, standing indecisive among the potted shrubbery of the garden
centre. He’s seen him also, solitary on the common. Unless one of them takes evasive action this is the first time their paths will cross since the funeral. George hasn’t yet seen him.
He has the opportunity to study the other man. He has aged, markedly. Somehow he looks chronically lonely in a way that Christopher knows he does not. Although fastidious as ever, there’s now
a whiff of desolation coming off George that he can sense at this distance. Somehow the louche outings never materialised. There’s something of the fallen streamers and flaccid balloons about
him, of the party that happened next door and abandoned the paraphernalia of gaiety to fade. It’s so obvious that people don’t want to be contaminated by proximity. He’s not the
neighbourhood roué, just a sad old man without the comfort of past compassions to console him. Perhaps, Christopher thinks, this is no more than he deserves. Like Marjory, the limits of his
concern stopped at the epidermis. Christopher is thinking of turning round, or drifting off into the copse and escaping detection, but thinks better of it. The funeral was one in a succession that
will eventually include both of them. There is too little time left. If he had gone to the crematorium he probably wouldn’t have met Gina and had the light introduced. George did him a
favour.

‘Hello, George.’

‘Oh... hello, Christopher.’ He is startled and wary. Their last real exchange was the calculated snub at the funeral. George is thinking that perhaps Christopher crept up on him to
return the favour. ‘And how’s the bonny wee Scots lassie?’

‘Pregnant.’

‘Oh.’ There’s a grudging admiration injected into this single syllable. Christopher knew he would jump to the wrong conclusion, ascribing to him the torrid afternoons George
aspired to, that singularly failed to happen.

‘Three months.’

Gina has talked about the chattering classes. There is a purpose in telling George. He’ll pass on the news in the spirit of randy camaraderie.

Having exchanged these greetings he and George are at a loss. He has assumed that the momentum of his good intentions would follow through. He was wrong. George, jealous in his wrong conclusion,
is somehow suddenly lonelier. One thing Christopher has come to realise since Marjory’s death, and Gina’s departure and return, is that there are strata of loneliness. He thinks it a
shame that having for so long shared this tiny portion of the surface of the earth, spoken the same language, trod the same byways, known the same people, they have so little in common. Out of
sympathy he is almost tempted to invite George to tea – but doesn’t. Both Gina and Vanessa dislike George. Neither would make any attempt to disguise it. George would misinterpret his
motives as flaunting his advantage, as he sees it. His sympathy for George doesn’t extend to disrupting the hard-won harmony back home.

‘Goodbye, George.’

‘Regards to your wee Scots bidie-in.’

He’s glad he didn’t invite him back. He leaves the path and wanders through the longer grass in the direction of the swing park. He often comes here, to sit on the bench nestled
among the mulched bark, but waits now till the younger children have gone. He can sit just now because it’s empty. The days of a solitary old man blamelessly watching children are no more. He
checks his trousers and the dog for burrs.

Perhaps next year he can bring the baby here and speculate with impunity. He finds it sad that the future scenarios of her and her child don’t seem to include a man, at least not in any of
her discussions with him. This exclusion seems to be voluntary. He’s noticed the attention she receives. The postman, a chronically shy man in his early thirties who delivered
Christopher’s mail for five years with disembodied efficiency now finds the letter box unassailable and hovers, uncertain, hoping for something that has nothing to do with Christopher. If
Christopher’s blurred outline appears in the opaque glass the correspondence arrives on the hall carpet in a decisive clump. He’s only one of a number. They won’t all be dissuaded
by a child. Perhaps she’ll meet someone.

Her accepting the house thing has given him an inner warmth. He hasn’t felt this gratified since primary school, when Miss McGuire rewarded his spelling with a long red tick. He was eight
and she in her early twenties. He can still hear the score of the pen on paper, the short forceful downward diagonal and the tangential flick, fading to infinity. She used bath salts and some sort
of lemon cologne that wafted, femininely. He thought her culture personified. He remembers flawless nails with half-moon cuticles. Beside her he felt small, grubby and inconsequential, caught in
the searchlight of her sophistication when she looked at him, forgave his awkwardness, and moved on. In her twenties, he reflects, Gina’s age. I would pass her in the street, if she was now
as she was then, and think her a child. She probably had children of her own, scarcely younger than I am. Grandchildren. She is probably dead now. Her lustrous hair grown dry, the skin papery and
striated, the cuticles faded to the pallor of the surrounding quick. Why do we spend such a disproportionate portion of our life being old? Why grow up so fast? Why sprint to the tape to stand two
feet away and loiter?

The cigar in his immobile hand has burned down to a grey cylinder. The swings are empty and sway with a tiny forlorn metallic creak, like the chirruping of a tardy cricket.

He knows he has been sitting too long, thinking too much, making himself indulgently sad, for no real reason other than the pleasant melancholy of nostalgia. The dog clairvoyantly stretches. He
braces hands on knees and stands. The ash disappears into the mulch. His strides are short, lengthening as his joints loosen. He opts for an unobtrusive entrance and makes for the back lane. He
reaches for the latch, stops, looks around. Irregular weeds sprout from ruptures in the cobbles. Overarching trees from gardens on both sides cast patches of green shade, a shifting mosaic in the
evening breeze. Drooping telegraph wires cradle the light in receding curves. Something which has been gaining ground for months overtakes him. For the first time since listening to his mother
read, he realises he is completely happy.

They are in the back room. He isn’t going to manage a quiet entrance. He can hear the voices from where he stands. They are too preoccupied to notice him yet. Vanessa is gesturing, the
other hand holding the largest of his glasses of wine. Gina tilts her head back in laughing profile. Vanessa notices him and smiles, complicity. Gina’s glance follows Vanessa’s. She
waves.