Boys and Girls (2 page)

‘Greasby was his name. His name was Greasby …'

‘But notwithstanding, Alan my sweet, does the thrust of my proposition still not stand?'

‘It wasn't the best thing I could have done. I'm not all sure, you know, that a thrust can
stand
 …'

‘Not your finest hour, you think on reflection? How very generous-spirited of you, Alan. How noble in defeat. It was the proposition I was referring to. Not the thrust. And what element of your daring foray into the fabulous world of hardware would you imagine became the very nadir? The lowest ebb. The rock bottom, the ultimate in ridiculous, would you say? Because me, I have long cherished my personal
favourite, and it would be just so wonderful if it were yours as well. Shall I go first? Shall I, Alan my sweet? Well all right, then. Now leaving aside the moment, of course, when you managed to sell what was remaining on the lease for a pitiful fraction of what you were sagacious enough to pay for the thing – to a wily developer who had the wisdom to raze the little hole to the ground, and sell on the land for a fortune—'

‘Nor am I convinced, Susan, that you can raze a hole to the ground …'

‘Alan. Do you wish me to lose my temper? Do you, my sweet? Because I am, I promise you, just this close. Now where were we? Oh yes. The low point of your seemingly unfathomable incompetence. And do please know that if you dare to suggest to me, that a state of unfathomability can be possessed of no low point, then I think I might be moved to terminate this discussion by the simple expedient of just killing you with a knife. Is that clear? I do very much hope so. Now then. To my way of thinking, I think the point must have been reached when the local paper picked up on the story that you were attempting to sell these sad little packets upon which you had written: screws, 3 approx. Too sad. Too too sad. I ask you, Alan: 3 approx!'

It was worse than she knows. On some of the packets I had written Longish Nails, Several, And Other Things Too. The problems arose when the shelves that had borne these vast open tins of all the bits and pieces for centuries just simply gave way the very day I came to own them – rot
and
woodworm, said the chippie I had to bring in, near enough crying with laughter – and there was no way at all I could bring myself to sort them all out. I had attempted to buy some little transparent bags, but these, apparently, have yet
to be invented, and so all in the end I could latch on to were hundreds upon hundreds of small manila envelopes. I had no idea in those days that woodscrews, say, were classified in girth by means of a simple number – one to eight, I think it is. My sizes ranged from Really Teeny Weeny to Very Big Indeed, but mostly tended to be labelled Assorted. And things like 3 approx. Oh dear me. But she's right though, Susan – of course she is. It wasn't brilliant. Nothing I touch ever seems to be. Or never mind brilliant, for Christ's sake – adequate would easily do, but these days even that seems surely to elude me. So it's not too surprising, is it? Really. On the whole. That she wants another husband. The only mystery, if I'm being honest with myself, is why she should want me as
well
, and not instead of … What good am I to her, after all? Oh well. But she's set on doing it – I know her, Susan. Some way or another, she'll do it, I just know she will. So we'll just have to wait, I suppose: see how it all works out.

I am a sensualist. Not at all, you see, how Alan I suppose must now have come to regard me. He may remember how it was I used to be, how he once saw me, though I somehow doubt it. And he has to be spoken to like that, you know, however unkind it might appear. I very rarely, of course, would subject him to anything like it in public – on extreme occasions, well yes, but only quite mildly. With him not having worked for so terribly long, you see (not in the proper sense, not in the sense of actually bringing in some bloody money) he has more than been given his proverbial inch, wouldn't you say? Really? And I cannot – not just for my sake, no, because there is always Amanda to be considered, if Alan only knew it – still just fourteen, but seeing everything before her, and I am sure quite
horribly clearly – and so as I say, I cannot, can I? Simply can't. Sit idly by and watch him take the yard. Because in common with many men, I suspect, he is at base quite thoroughly idle. He will do what he is permitted to get away with. But Alan, you see, as with all the very most pitiable cases, he is not, as you might say, the idler par excellence, in the sense of just loafing about. I mean he drinks too much, obviously – maybe even more than I am aware of – and he staggers out of his bed ever later and later in the … well, I was going to say
morning
, but so often now it can easily be lunchtime, and especially at the weekends. In many ways I don't really mind it, to be truthful, because then he's not constantly under my feet. This is part of what I was saying, you see, about his own quite particular brand of idleness (it is peculiar to him) – he's a bustler, Alan, always active, some fool thing on the go, but never actually getting around to achieving an
end
. Either because he quickly loses interest (you can actually see it die, behind his eyes) or else the task in hand – whatever little thing it might be – will have simply, and yet once again, proved to be utterly beyond him.

I should love to be able to say that on the day I first met him, I was breathless and slammed by the wall of his charm, the wit and dazzle in the eyes, his savage good looks that made me pulsate. Sometimes, indeed – during my cold and older moments, alone, so often in the night, when I have needed not just a lustful comforting but the grain of an explanation as to why I have actually or ever gone through or along with anything at all in the whole of my life – I have wilfully and falsely remembered, almost inveigling myself into unquestioningly swallowing all of this as truth. But here is mere embroidery, for decoration's sake – more than that, in
truth, for no embroidery, no matter how gaudy nor intricate, could ever be so ornate as my own imaginings, their contrasts picked out sharply. For I am a sensualist – a sensualist, yes: I love the
feel
of things, you see, and not just deeply.

He was not, of course, a man without qualities. Alan was always then and still I suppose is, a perfectly reasonably handsome man – as Maria, my very oldest friend (who I almost know is also quite dear to me), will sometimes rather swinishly indicate, if ever she senses a chink in my composure, a hairline that she can agitate with a cold and fine-gauged needle. He is intelligent (I could not have lived with a fool) though not, we don't think (do we?) in any way –
intellectual
: even to whisper the word into Alan's atmosphere, the soft breath catches within you and the moment seems immediately to me to be one of regret, but also quite giddily humorous. A rich man? Powerful? Oh no – but I did detect the bare bones of a prospect, you see. I was completely prepared to have faith, wanting it to devour me. To faith though, I have found, there is most certainly a very closely proscribed perimeter – the limit, my boundaries. Beyond them it becomes almost Catholic and hysterical in its purposeful blindness; in order to remain yourself, the demands of faith must not encompass your leaving behind all reason. So I could go on believing in Alan, you see, only up until the moment when he faltered and doubted himself – then, I think, we both of us felt immediately rather stupid, for having wandered, wide-eyed and parallel in a dream of our own concoction, and for quite so long. We should all know, really, shouldn't we, that the defining features of dreams are that they are not real and that one does wake up, and out of them. And yet their warm and languorous embrace (the harlot promise of a ready bliss)
is so very headily seductive that we are tricked every time into believing the illusion – then comes the plummet, and we are grasping blindly and with such desperation, at the scattering spangles of a now dowdy mirage, mocking us and fading before our very eyes. There can be few crueller moments than a rough and reluctant awakening. I would never say this, or anything like it, if Alan were around. I always do, though, think it.

In a way, it might be said that I rescued him. We both of us pretended otherwise at the time, of course (if we were already pretending, then … it maybe hadn't yet come to it: no, I have to suppose that right at the very beginning it wouldn't have, really). I had this small but terribly attractive flat in the very best part of Chelsea, thanks to my darling father (heaven knows I miss it, and I miss him too). I never had a job, not really, never really wanted one. I knew that I always had needed a man to look after me (cherish, spoil, adore and ravish me would all have been lovely, but just looking after, I could have coped with that). Because I am so beautiful and clever – and no, there is no point at all in talking down or gigglingly blushing over the very evident truth of the matter: I have always possessed this luscious and almost liquid ability to raise or reduce any man at all to the level at which he clearly belongs. And so because of this, I suppose that my Daddy was simply assuming that someone maybe even as wonderful as he would some day come along (not possible, as we both of us knew) and that until that day he'd be happy to keep me warm and safe, and gently ticking over. And there were men, of course there were – I soon grew weary of their constant and really quite overwhelming attentions. If I had ever to slip out quickly to a supermarket for some soup cartons or a quiche,
say, I took to consciously making myself as hideous as a beauty can ever be – headscarf, flats, no make-up – simply to avoid some or other hopeful, oh God –
boulevardier
utterly revelling in his own ready wit, in his cool audacity – and canvassing my views on this or that bouillon, asking me constantly if I lived around here, suggesting that we could do worse than to pool the fruits of our trolley and basket, add much burgundy and hie away to rustle up something impromptu, somewhere nearby. Always they thought their approach so original – either brash and very cocksure, which I hate, just hate (unlike assurance and a true and manly confidence, which I am not sure I have ever encountered, except in my father), or else there would be a coy and stuttering attempt at boyishness, so pink and appealing in a puppydog way, and this of course I loathe even more – as I do puppydogs, as a matter of fact. Kittens too – they make me squirm. It is not that I wish any animal harm – and nor, I suppose, was I ever moved to react with violence to the endless strings of young and old men who perpetually were annoying me; I just never wanted to touch, that's all, not have them brushing against me, neither licking nor purring. And then suddenly – and how and why on earth in the world do these things happen? – suddenly, there was Alan. Who for reasons now very much lost to me, I evidently imagined would do.

He lived at the time in a … what shall we call it? Run-down apartment in a not very nice part of London? No – it hardly does it justice: hellhole is what we were dealing with here (it's always just as well to be frank about things). I invited him remarkably swiftly to share my beautiful little Chelsea home – part one of the rescue, I suppose, though I am sure that at the time I was unaware of being party to the launch of any such
thing. At first I did not notice the ugliness of his shoes, say, one of them on its side on my pale-pink Chinese rug. Did not gag at the hair in the washbasin. I even chipped away gamely at the caked-on cornflakes in a long-abandoned bowl. I must have loved him, or else why would I? I did love him, of course I did – I remember the fact of it, if even the merest tingle of engulfment has utterly departed. And I still do, really – love him, if only in a rather residual sort of a way. But I am done with trying to boost and reinforce him: his battlements are stormed, he has no longer any defences. And this is why he must now be supplemented – I am helping him by bringing in another strength (and one day, my Alan, my sweet, he will see it).

He was sort of a jobbing journalist at the time I first met him: of course, he had failed at a clutch of other quite airy occupations prior to failing at jobbing journalism – and this was before he came to fail in advertising and close on a decade away from his ultimate and staining failure amid all the silliness of hardware. Some or other paper you will by no means have heard of had given him an agony column, which neither of us considered to be even a little bit comical, rather bewilderingly. At the outset, he made a sort of an effort with the solving of all these personal problems (at the outset, he generally will – and the Lord only knows how many utterly blameless lives he devastated as a consequence), but soon he was had up by the editor for replying in print to every single letter with something along the lines of ‘It rather depends, really' or ‘Well yes and no, if you see what I mean'. He was moved to a ‘handy hints' sort of a column – I seem to recall, you know, that its title might have been actually Handy Hints – though of course because my poor dear Alan has not an iota
of practical knowledge of any single thing on God's earth, this was never going to be the most dizzying success. He grew angry, I think, with his ignorance, his own incapability – this was some time before the internet, you see, so there were so few ways even to cheat at it effectively. They finally fired him when he printed the following … I saved it … it's rather wonderful, in its way … I'm just now calling it up … yes yes – this is it: ‘Here's a hot tip for the winter months ahead – get hold of an old pair of tights, and then just ram your bloody old legs into them!' Dear dear. But you see, where others abandon him, my inclination is always to keep him on, help him where I can. I have to admit, of course, that we have now reached the point where I am no longer willing or capable of doing it on my own – I need a big strong man to help me. But I would never just let him
go
 … how could I? And marriage, it is after all a
contract
, you know: so many seem to forget that.