Unfaithfully Yours (28 page)

I think both of us feel we would not mind if we never saw you again. Ever. I suppose there is little chance of that. If I know anything about you, it will not be as simple as ‘selling the house and dividing the proceeds’ – all I hope is that Elizabeth never has to see you or talk to you ever again. Maybe this will be a chance for a lawyer, as long as it isn’t you, to actually do something useful.

I am leaving this letter on your hall table, next to your cycling helmet. I hope it makes you realize how badly you have treated Elizabeth. No, that is not what I hope. I hope it fucking chokes you, Gerry.

John Goldsmith

From:

Barbara Goldsmith

The Palehorse Hotel

Little Bransyng

Norfolk

1 December

To:

John Goldsmith

101 Fellen Road

Putney

Dear John,

I hope you are getting on well with the farting noises. However low you get, I know it is something that never fails to amuse you. Jas and Josh did not mention that the three of you had all bonded together by sharing this simple pleasure. In fact, in the brief call I had with them, both of them said they had not seen you ‘for yonks’. In so far as either of them expressed emotion of any kind, I would have said they were worried about you.

‘Where’s Dad?’ Josh said. I said I didn’t know.

‘Oh,’ said Jas – they were both on the speakerphone in Josh’s car, ‘ that’s a bit rough!’

‘Why am I supposed to know where he is?’ I said.

‘Because –
doh
– he’s your husband.
Doh
!’ said Josh.

‘Not for much longer, I suspect!’ I said brightly.

That shut them up for a few minutes. Any suggestion that human relationships may be under discussion is usually a pretty good way of silencing them. I moved the conversation, effortlessly, to rugby. They were on their way to or from a match. At least that meant I didn’t have to try to pretend to remember their wives’ names or make baby talk to February or Solstice, or whatever the little swine are called. We talked about rugby for a bit – or, rather, they did. Then the silence returned.

‘You’re not really . . . leaving Dad, are you?’ said Jas.

Interesting that they couldn’t conceive of you having the nerve to walk out yourself. I think – as you rightly suspected – that that was why I kept the tone of that letter so consistently unpleasant. It took that to get you moving.

‘Because,’ said Josh, ‘he is a good husband and father!’

I couldn’t believe I was hearing this. I think I may even have said so. Good husband and father???? Out of what manual did they get that one?

‘I mean,’ said Jas, ‘he’s a really good doctor!’

‘The jury’s out on that!’ I said.

Another very long silence. I could hear them groping for your other good qualities as Jas’s BMW took them closer and closer to the enticing prospect of running around with twenty-eight other large men who have been trained from birth to feel nothing.

‘He is,’ said Josh, ‘a good provider!’

He was clearly still reading directly from the manual that had provided his earlier insights into your character. It is interesting to note, while on this subject, that money earned by women doesn’t really count. The fact that I earned about eighty thousand pounds last year doesn’t seem to matter, as far as they are concerned. I don’t think either of them has ever read a word of one of my books. Neither, from your brief remarks in what may well have been your last letter to me, have you. You are the man, John, who, when I asked him if he liked Nabokov, replied, ‘Only with cheese on it.’

‘You go on at him sometimes!’ said Jas.

I suddenly felt very tired.

‘It’s all right, boys,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t worry about it. He doesn’t listen.’

‘It’s very important,’ said Josh, ‘not to listen to women.’

I think this was intended humorously but, like all jokes made at my expense, it had the definite intention of putting me in the place I have steadfastly refused to occupy for the last thirty-odd years of their lives.

I have no idea where you are, John. I am assuming you will return at some point so I am sending this letter to the big, clean, characterless house where we have lived together for so long. What I am going to say is difficult – I don’t think Gerry has yet had the guts to say it to Elizabeth – but I am going to say it and have told him I am going to say it so here goes.

I have been in love with Gerry Price for the last forty-three years. I fell in love with him on the day I met him on a hot summer’s day in Oxford in the summer of 1968. Remember 1968?

I had been to see a guy I knew in Magdalen. It must have been the summer term of my second year. I had played Hermione in the OUDS production of
The Winter’s Tale
, directed by this man (I think he was called Rick) who, for reasons none of us ever quite fathomed, decided to set the whole thing in Poland in the 1930s. He kept trying to kiss me, which I didn’t like at all. I got out of his room and walked along the cloisters, looking out on to the cool lawn and the sunlight, and thought I was very lucky to be such a clever girl who acted in plays and got a great deal of attention from young men like Rick.

One of the doors of the studies that faced directly on to the cloisters was open and I looked in as I walked past. Gerry was lying on a sofa, smoking a cigarette. He had long hair in those days, right down to his shoulders. He glanced up and saw me. He smiled. He had that same great, jagged mouth and that same predatory look about him. His eyes were bright with mockery and fun and intelligence. We both just couldn’t stop staring at each other. I don’t know how long I stood there.

‘You’re Barbara Sharpe, aren’t you?’ he said eventually. ‘You were in that play!’

I smiled and said I was indeed Barbara Sharpe and had, indeed, played Hermione in
The Winter’s Tale
. I stood there, waiting for the compliments. They did not come. Instead he just lay on the sofa, staring at me. It was strange. Although his hair suggested hippie inclinations, he was wearing a dark suit, even on that beautiful summer day, and he had on a newly pressed clean white shirt.

‘And may I know who you are?’ I said.

The way he was looking at me had started to unsettle me. I couldn’t have said quite why. I think – and this is something I have only just understood – it was sadness in his eyes. As if he had seen bad things ahead for both of us.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I’m a boring lawyer and I’m going to leave Oxford and make a lot of money and be very, very boring.’

‘I meant,’ I said, slowly, ‘what is your name?’

He didn’t answer this question. He just kept looking at me with those eyes of his, and now it was as if he was laughing at the two of us. He got up off the sofa.

‘I saw you,’ he said, ‘walking across Oriel quad.’

‘I’m allowed to do that!’ I said. I was beginning to be slightly irritated by him, but still I did not move. I felt that I wanted to stand there for ever on that hot summer afternoon, with someone down the corridor playing ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’ by Procul Harum. When they got to the end of the track, whoever was playing it moved the needle right back to the beginning. The organ kept on with that Bach-ripped-off riff and the singer managed to sound like he had something we knew no white man ever really had, i.e. the blues.

Gerry, who wasn’t, of course, Gerry then, just some guy in a room in Magdalen, was walking towards me now and I felt that something very important was going to happen, but I couldn’t have said quite what. If he had kissed me, right there and then, I would not have objected. If he had asked me out, I would have said yes, but neither of those things happened. Instead he got that sad look in his eyes again.

‘I don’t want to be a boring lawyer,’ he said, ‘but that’s probably what I’m going to be. Wouldn’t it be great if you could walk away from the life that everyone seems to have chosen for you? It’s not the life I want, but it’s the life I know I’m going to get. A house in the suburbs and two point four children. Jesus!’

His face darkened. Then, suddenly, for no reason that I could see, he broke into a smile and he seemed much younger. I felt I knew exactly how he must have looked as a child. I remember thinking that, in spite of what he had said about being boring, life with him could be very exciting; but, just as I started thinking this, he started to close the door against the sunlight and the beautiful June day outside.

‘I have to work,’ he said, very gently. ‘Goodbye, Barbara Sharpe.’ It was only when the door was firmly shut against me that I realized I had not even found out his name.

The next time I saw him was in Putney. He was married to Elizabeth and I was married to you, John.

As a novelist, I would like to tell you a different story. To show you, perhaps, how, over the years, as parents of children who went to the same schools, we became part of a network of middle-class families who gave dinner parties for each other, played tennis and even took joint holidays in hired villas in France, Spain and Italy. How, gradually, at these enlivening social occasions, maybe at the St Jude’s Wine and Cheese in Aid of New Playground Equipment or, possibly, at the Putney Choral Society’s groundbreaking version of ‘Easy Bits of
Elijah
with Piano, Five Violins and Mr Goldberg on Cello and Timpani’, Gerry and I found ourselves exchanging glances, then phone numbers and, finally, a room in a hotel somewhere for a bit of off-piste shagging.

It wasn’t like that. It was simply that we had been in love with each other since, oh, since before we even met. We both put up with being apart from each other for all those years and then, one day, neither of us could stand it any longer. I don’t think either of us ever spoke properly about what each felt about the other. There wasn’t any need to say anything at all. We both knew. Perhaps there were moments when our knowledge of the simple fact that the two of us were meant to be together floated uncomfortably close to the surface but, certainly, nothing was ever said. For years, we were very careful not to touch each other. Or, if possible, even to get too close. Everyone thought we disliked each other and that suited both of us just fine.

Life is a stupid business, isn’t it? I am not saying either of us was aware that that was how it was at the time. We were not, either of us, so bound by the conventions of marriage that we were struggling with feelings we knew to be wrong or anything of that sort. It is simply that this was how it was but neither of us could see it. You never know until it is far too late, but we know it now and, even if we did not know it then, we can see that that was what made us both the people we were. It is almost too late for me and Gerry, but not quite too late.

I am sorry, John. I could have wished I had not fallen in love with a man you disliked so violently. I am very anxious to stop you coming after him with, or without, a tennis racquet. We are going to be here for at least another week, and if you want to write or call, please do so. I suspect you may not even get this letter until things have changed yet again. Perhaps by then Gerry will have been able to face Elizabeth. I have tried to call you and find out where you are but you clearly do not want to see or speak to me so perhaps this may find you. I am genuinely sorry about what has happened.

You can’t do anything about what you feel, John – and sometimes you simply have to act on it. We are staying in Room 12 here and, if you do get this letter and feel the urge to drive up the motorway with a sledgehammer, I should take the precaution of calling first.

Barbara

From:

Elizabeth Price

101 Fellen Road

Putney

2 December

To:

Barbara Goldsmith

The Palehorse Hotel

Little Bransyng

Norfolk

Oh, Barbara,

You can do so much better than that, can’t you? Most of my girls could have managed a better brush-off letter. At Dame Veronica’s we try to teach them to express themselves gracefully. The Latin I have been drilling into them all these years does seem to help.

I thought you were supposed to be a novelist. I thought you dealt in credible motive and realistic motivation and all those things that make invented characters come alive. Oh, sorry. You’re not that kind of novelist, are you? You are the kind of novelist who goes on about signifiers and signified and who, fundamentally, thinks words do not really mean what they seem to mean.

‘Meaning,’ I seem to remember you saying in one interview I read, ‘is undecidable and indecipherable.’ Certainly your novels are both of those things, which is probably why I usually throw them across the room on about page twelve.

We have to be very careful, of course, about language. The sort of people the snobbish part of me despises often, for example, use inverted commas when they come to a word that is worrying or perhaps overly important to them. They feel the need, when engaged in this business of writing things down, to put a distance between themselves and what it is they are trying to convey. Actually I now think their awkwardness is a kind of honesty. You have no awkwardness whatsoever when it comes to language. You think you can make it mean anything you want it to mean.

Hence your extraordinary letter.

‘
It was simply that we had been in love with each other since, oh, since before we even met
.’

Excuse me, Barbara – what does that actually mean? How the fuck can you be in love with someone you do not even know? And how can you make a single casual meeting in an Oxford college the basis of a smouldering passion that smouldered away for forty-odd years and was then, for no good reason that I can see, suddenly allowed to flower, burst into flames, erupt and whatever other form of cliché seems appropriate to describe suppressed passion finally learning to hold its high head high, walk tall, etc., etc.

For fuck’s sake, Barbara. What was really going on? Have the decency to tell us – please. I almost prefer Gerald’s cowardice to your horribly trendy lies.

‘
We both put up with being apart from each other for all those years and then, one day, neither of us could stand it any longer.
’