Unfaithfully Yours (11 page)

I had been meaning to get in touch with Old Sam – as everyone used to call him – in connection with a rather irritating dental problem, as he is, though a little on the dull side, an absolutely brilliant dentist, but I could never quite face it. I have also lost his address! Anyway, we got talking about our kids. I don’t know why, by the way, I pretended any of mine had gone to Oxford – it was a delusion of my late wife’s, which she always made me keep up with our so-called local friends – as in fact they are all something of a disaster.

One of them did something so frightful I cannot even bear to mention it. It was in Thailand – but that does not make it any better.

So it was not the night for me to explore a hidden part of my sexuality. I have told no one else I know about these feelings. They are totally private. I often identify, violently, with ‘Sailor Boy’, the penguin I told you about – yes, ‘Nancy Boy’ was the dolphin – in his urge to hide behind a rock when consummating his love for ‘Butch’. Isn’t all human sexuality meant to be private? Why should we let everyone know what we are feeling and thinking? Why do ‘gay’ people all have to line up together as if they were part of the same fucking football team? My sexual feelings are nothing to do with anyone else at all . . . apart, of course, from . . . you ‘Bo’sun’!

Let me know which of the bearded men you were. I long to meet you and be your faithful, submissive and ecstatically happy

‘Cabin Boy’

From:

Samuel Dimmock

Dimmock Dentistry

‘Because Teeth Matter’

24 Beeston Crescent

Putney

24 September

To:

Mike Larner

24 Lawson Crescent

Putney

Dear Mike,

I hope you will forgive this letter. I had a devil of a job tracking down your home address. You are not in the phone book and, as I do not see any of the people we used to know from St Jude’s, I had no means of tracing you via Johnny Goldsmith or the horrifically conceited and odious Gerald Price.

In the end, to my surprise, Elaine had a contact number for Conrad. The poor little bugger is still living at home and trying to write his novel about the Spanish Civil War. He, for some reason, is in touch with Molly (or is it Milly?), who seems to have had a bit of a hard time herself recently, and she gave me, at long last, your details. It seems she got pregnant by some bastard in local radio, had an abortion and has decided she is a lesbian. Although I suppose you know all this. I do remember you having a wonderful and glamorous job at the Beeb and all of us teasing you about whether you knew David Attenborough. Isn’t he just great? Did you see him with those wolverines the other day?

Is it true you have ripped your phone out of the wall? And made a vow not to see anyone for five years? That was what Molly (or should that be Milly?) told Elaine. I could not believe it, Mike. You were always the life and soul of the party in the old days. You seemed pretty chipper the other night

I suppose Milly, or Molly, is following in your footsteps. She was always a tough, no-nonsense little girl. I do remember her thumping Elaine once in Mont-Verlaine-les-Deux-Arbres, or whatever that ghastly place in Brittany was called. Whatever happened to Barnaby? He was such a talkative, lively little chap with a finger in every pie. I remember one night in Spain he got hold of Gerald Price’s underpants and cut them into thin strips. I could see Mr Price was dying to thump him – or at least scream at him the way he screamed at poor Conrad – but he was too frightened of Mrs P to do anything about it. My God, there was a scary woman, eh? I bet her Latin class have all had nervous breakdowns.

It was so nice to meet you by chance in the Spotted Cow the other day. It is not a pub I usually visit, the quiz night notwithstanding, and it was great to get a chance to catch up. We never really talked on those villa holidays, did we? I am quite a shy person and was usually pretty preoccupied with Elaine. As were you with your brood. Anyway – I was just the boring old dentist with a beard and you were the glamorous director with many hilarious stories of films you had made and famous personalities with whom you had had lunch.

I was so sorry to hear about Pamela. She was an incredibly lively person – always up and doing, often, I seem to remember, at five or six in the morning. I can still remember her calling out to you and giving you your marching orders for the day. I don’t think I have ever seen a man scrub a patio floor quite so hard! I wasn’t quite clear, from what you said, about how she died, but I did gather there was something not quite right about it.

Mary and I rub along OK. I have got to go and see her in
Hamlet
in a few weeks’ time, which I am dreading. She says Gerald Price, who is also in it, is absolutely dreadful. One of the things I enjoyed most about our chat was the chance to have a good old bitch about the Butch Barrister, as we used to call him. But she has made a new friend there called Gibbons, who’s become a patient of mine. He is in and out of our surgery all the time. A bit of a dental hypochondriac, I suspect. I rather like him and am hoping he will take her off to the theatre to see those plays to which she is always dragging me.

I would rather be out on the open sea myself. If you ever fancied a trip in my boat I would love to take you out in her. I can easily show you the ropes and though I am a bit of a Fascist when on board I will try to be gentle with you – for the first few hours anyway! If you don’t like using the phone just drop me a line to the above address …

All the best

Sam Dimmock

From:

Mike Larner

24 Lawson Crescent

Putney

28 September

To:

Samuel Dimmock

Dimmock Dentistry

‘Because Teeth Matter’

24 Beeston Crescent

Putney

Dear Sam,

Very kind of you to write. I don’t have enough human contact these days. I suppose I have got very wrapped up in myself and my own problems. Pamela always said I was self-obsessed. Although I must say I never spent a quarter of the time she spent looking in the mirror, examining my own weight or going over my relationship with my mother with the kind of care and attention shown by medieval commentators to the Bible. To her, ‘self-obsessed’ simply meant ‘not interested enough in her’.

It is very kind of you to ask me out on your boat. I never thought of you as a sailing man. Finding out that you are has started to alter my perception of you. We have stereotypes of people, don’t we? And they often do not correspond to what the person is really like at all. Maybe by writing to each other we can get to know each other a little better.

I am not really a man for the ocean wave. Except, of course, in my fantasy life! I must admit that I quite like the idea of discipline and – make of this what you will – I never have problems obeying orders if those orders are given by another chap! But I wouldn’t like to think of you being disappointed in me as a possible crew member. I would hate to let you down.

I once had dinner with John Goldsmith, years ago, on a yacht that belonged to a friend of his, and, though we only spent an hour or two on the thing, and St Katharine Dock was always in full view during dinner, by the end of the evening I felt as if I had just done twenty years in the Château d’If.

Letters are about all I can cope with at the moment. Face-to-face contact with anyone brings me out in a cold sweat. But that was not the case with you! It was incredibly pleasant to meet up and chat with you after all these years. Actually, I sometimes think Pam had a point and that, for much of the time, I never really noticed other people at all! Something to do with working at the BBC for thirty years. A place, which, as George Orwell said, combines the worst elements of a lunatic asylum and a girls’ boarding school. It was really interesting to hear you talk about teeth in such depth. I promise to brush more regularly, Sam, and will take your tip about flossing very seriously indeed. I do have bleeding gums and never really knew what caused it until you filled me in the other night.

No – it was a good chat. I suspect in the old days we were all so busy droning on about our lives that we never really listened to either you or John Goldsmith. What a nice guy he was, wasn’t he? I’m sad to have lost touch with him.

But his wife was absolutely not a nice guy, was she? Barbara Goldsmith! My God! I thought I saw her going into the Putney Odeon about eight years ago and, although I had tickets for
Bridget Jones: the Edge of Reason
, I ran and hid in what was then, I think, still the Café Rouge on Putney Bridge Road.

Perhaps I can open my heart to you, Sam. I’m not sure it’s a good idea, but I feel I want to. You mustn’t take anything I say the wrong way but I will admit to you that, in many ways, I am not the man I thought I was and I am beginning to feel that you may be basically a different person from the Sam Dimmock we all knew in the old days. You may have interests that go well beyond dentistry. If you take my meaning.

I hated my wife, Sam. I really did hate her. That is an awful thing to say but it’s true. I never felt I was who I was when I was with her. If you know what I mean. And I am beginning to suspect you do.

Oh, I shouldn’t talk about the dead like this – though I must say I have never understood why we are supposed to be nice about them. What difference does being dead make to whether a person is or is not a total cunt? Sorry to use that word. I saw you flinch a couple of times the other night when my mouth got the better of me – which I am afraid it always does. When I get talking about Gerald Price, for example, I fall to cursing like a very drab. I suppose, for various reasons, which are too complicated to go into here, my relationship with Pamela was utterly unresolved when she died. I am still having those arguments we used to have in Puerto Banús. Do you remember the night she threw an entire plate of clams at me? If it hadn’t been for Johnny Goldsmith I think we would have killed each other.

I didn’t really talk about how she died, did I? I haven’t told this story to anyone but I so much enjoyed our chat that I feel I can tell you. And writing it down – rather than telling it to your face – seems so much easier somehow. I’m in my overgrown garden, with my back to the late-September sun. For the first time in what feels like years I am starting to feel happy but I don’t know why. I have no garden furniture – I got rid of it all after Pamela died. One of the many things I constantly celebrate about her death is that I will never have to go to a garden centre again. So, imagine me on one of our heavy dining-room chairs, with a pillow at my back, scribbling for dear life as, in the thick bushes that screen me from my irritating neighbours, I hear a blackbird try out aspects of its eloquence on the sun-warmed brickwork of my so-neglected suburban property.

I am wearing a figure-hugging shirt and espadrilles, which, though I say it myself, suit me rather well.

The garden was so neat the night she died. Well – she was a keen gardener.

It was a particularly warm November that year. I had gone out for a drink with a bloke called Basil, from the BBC. Not a very nice man. In fact, a gay friend of mine once said he was the kind of person who ‘gave homosexuality a bad name’ but for some reason he had weaselled himself into a position of authority in the Natural History Department. He knew absolutely nothing about animals – he once told me he disliked almost every species under the sun apart from some South American reptiles – but he prided himself on being what a lot of people at the Beeb used to call a ‘filmmaker’. He had made a quite well-thought-of series about English insects that included a gratuitous stop-motion sequence about a group of earwigs attacking each other. I needed his help with some political issue in the department and we ended up having a meal in a grim Italian restaurant.

When I got back the house was dark. Which surprised me. Pamela usually never went to bed before midnight and it was only just after eleven. It was dark and silent in a way that made me know, as soon as I opened the front door, that something bad had happened inside. I didn’t call out her name. Still don’t know why. I think I knew that whatever bad thing it was had happened to her. I went, very slowly, along our narrow hall and opened the door to the sitting room.

The first thing I saw was that the french windows were open.

Oh, I remember thinking. Someone’s been having a party! That was because I could smell cigarette smoke and neither Pamela nor I had ever acquired the tobacco habit. It was only then that I saw the things scattered across the carpet. There was a vase, a couple of framed photographs of the kids and, by the sofa, a half-empty bottle of red wine. It had leaked on to the carpet, spreading outwards in a blurred circle. Pamela’s left hand, flung out at right angles to her body, looked as if it were still groping for the bottle.

I knew straight away that she was dead. I don’t know why because I think hers was the first dead body I had ever seen. My father was still alive back then, even if the Alzheimer’s had made him almost as unrecognizable as the people and things he, in his turn, failed to recognize.

I went straight over to her and, mimicking something I had seen people do in detective stories on television, put my hand to the vein in her neck. It was a totally unnecessary gesture. But it made me feel better. It was then that I saw the bottle of pills. It, too, was leaking cargo on to Pamela’s pride and joy of an oatmeal carpet. There was a scattered arc of brightly coloured capsules, thrown out as carelessly as her arms, inches from her brightly painted nails.

I remember the nails, the way I remember the elaborate makeup, which she had not been wearing in the early part of the evening. I remember the earrings, too, gold, studded with diamonds. I bought them for her on our tenth wedding anniversary, but I never saw her wear them until the night she died. She had a tiny, foxy chin, and I do recall thinking how aggressive it looked, jutting up uselessly from what I suddenly saw was a very tiny neck. She was a party girl, really. She saw me as someone who would introduce her to the glamorous life of the BBC , to smart dinner parties, champagne receptions and celebrities like – God help us – David Attenborough.