Byron Easy (63 page)

The note signed off wishing me well, and hoping that one day I would publish some more of my poems, which she had never read but was dying to see. Another Spanish trait—they took their poetry and poets very seriously. Unlike in England, where their status, despite the Bard and lip service to the Laureate, is akin to that of paedophiles or estate agents in terms of social currency. I put the card on my mantelpiece, where it still sits, next to the spew of loose change and that other card, the one from Mandy with the Mediterranean scene and the sentimental, heartbreaking message. I remember thinking for a long time about Leo, the day already dark outside at three, the croupiers just stirring in the kitchen below. She also had a lot of heart. I tried to picture her cooking for her lover in the Tarragona flat, standing squat on the stone tiles, the air scented, her greying hedge of hair wrapped in a scarf. Still with her air of properness and self-restraint; finally out of the closet after forty years. Very much on my mind at the time were the people I might or might not see again. People become partisan when a marriage breaks up. What other choice do they have? With Leo, I thought the chances of ever having any contact with her again were next to zero. What excuse did I have? Initially I had thought of her as a gentle, timid presence—weak even. But she was a woman whose interior was arcane, occult; a secret—like precious documents in a bank vault. She made me think again of my people-blindness, another subject that kept me awake at night, clutching the mouldy borrowed duvet. She was a grown-up, with deeds done: her passions evolved and modified by a life lived—and how many of those did I know? People really are very mysterious in the end: their consciousnesses coinciding with ours in the little windows of opportunity that we are afforded. Sitting there, with Leo’s card staring at me from the bare mantelpiece, I hoped she was happy I also concluded that human beings were like artichokes—they exfoliated inwardly: you never got the true picture, even when you were in close proximity for years.

Around the same time, I had an unwanted and chilly phone call from Ian Haste. He wanted to know, principally, when Mandy and I were going to get a divorce. Were we aware, for example, of the financial implications of staying each other’s next of kin? His voice, always holding at bay those cockney vowels, was a surprise when it came on the line. After the small talk and formalities were out of the way he informed me, ‘If anything happens to either of you, the remaining partner gets the lot. You do realise that?’

I told him I didn’t, but added, ‘There’s nothing to divide up anyway. There is no “lot”.’

‘Maybe not for you. I don’t want my daughter to be forced into giving everything she has to you.’ He sounded circumspect, ostentatiously frosty.

Knowing I probably wouldn’t see him again, I said, ‘What does she have? It’s not like she’s successful or anything. Most of that stuff in the flat belonged to both of us and I don’t care if she keeps it.’

‘That’s as may be, but from my own experience, you have to get things straight.’

He was talking with the easy assurance of a man who had seen all this coming. Maybe I was the only one who hadn’t. This made me want to take the train to Slough and desecrate his fastidiously maintained lawns, to smash the tacky Renoir over his head.

‘I’m not in a position to think any of this through, Mr Haste. I’m still trying to get my head around it.’

I knew he would loathe me even more for this statement. His ethos was practicality, common sense, endurance. For him, an artist was a genetic aberration, like a homosexual.

‘I can start the divorce proceedings myself if you want, at the local county court.’ I had already had a communication from his solicitors, Openwork, Gallipot and Allwit, stating the benefits of dissolving the marriage forthwith.

‘No, don’t do that,’ I said, panicked. My consent or otherwise to a divorce was the only feeble straw of power I had left against the steamroller that was Mandy. If she wanted to marry one of her Italian lover boys she would just have to wait. For eternity, if possible.

‘I see you’re going to make things difficult for everyone,’ he said coldly.

‘Difficult!’ I exclaimed, heart-sore and shocked. It only took a slight flesh wound to set me off. Isn’t your daughter the most difficult person in the world? You know, I’m not convinced she didn’t plan this. Didn’t plan to end up with that flat and everything in it. It’s all run too smoothly for it to be otherwise.’ There was a silence at the end of the line. In the past, I had successfully appealed to his sense of his daughter’s waywardness, but not now. He had come down firmly on her side, on the side of kin. A sour egocentric man who never gave his daughter anything but a prominent white scar on her forehead. I said, ‘Why don’t you all shaft me a little bit more? Go on, I can take it!’

Ian Haste said, ‘You’re a little geezer, aren’t you?’

Flabbergasted, I asked, ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ He had sounded just like an East End gangster.

‘I’d love to knock your block off

‘You don’t know where I live.’

‘I can find out,’ he said menacingly.

‘We’ll see,’ I replied, and put the phone down.

For a number of days after Mr Haste’s heartwarming call I tried to imagine him there in his big tasteless house with only his black dog for company. Had I been blind about him too? There he was, planning revenge, this Longshanks of the suburbs, chain-smoking Dunhills with his bat-like hands. His reticent manner in the past always hid an overweening stubbornness, a slyness, an antagonism. And this wasn’t just paranoia, although much of my thinking at the time bordered on the insane. I gave strict instructions to the croupiers and the classical musician to vet all my calls. If a male, pseudo-elocuted voice came on the line, I had emigrated to Australia to be reunited with my father. One night soon after the split, I was handed the phone in the kitchen.

‘Byron, it’s Sarah,’ a small voice said.

‘Sarah!’ I had only talked to her once to her since the awful night in the Indian restaurant. She sounded effusive and bright.

‘I thought I’d call and see how you were. It took ages to get your number.’

‘I’m okay, I suppose,’ I said, not wanting to burden her. ‘How did you get it, by the way? Not from Mandy, surely.’

‘That hysterical bitch? You’re joking aren’t you,’ she said, and I felt happy, like I always felt when people took my side. It’s amazing how many so-called friends play devil’s advocate after a break-up, as if your emotions are some sort of game they feel they can judge without examining the evidence. ‘No, I got it off Rudi.’

‘Yeah, he gives my number to everyone. How’s college?’

I had heard through the grapevine that she hadn’t made Cambridge, and instead was studying medicine at King’s in London. Our proximity hadn’t encouraged me to track her down. I felt somehow responsible for what Mandy had said that night—after all, I had inflicted my wife on everyone. I had opened their eyes to behaviour, to human capabilities, I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.

Sarah said, ‘It’s going really well—only another six years to go. Listen, I have some news for you. Do you remember that girl you went out with ages ago?’ She paused to giggle for a moment, ‘Sorry, of course you must remember. Beatrice, long brown hair, plummy voice. Well, she’s doing a PhD at King’s. Can you believe it?’

‘Really?’ I felt, suddenly vulnerable at this information. Open on all flanks to considerable emotions. My one thought: it doesn’t get any easier as you get older, does it? ‘Did you talk to her?’

I tried to imagine Bea now, with her chestnut hair and deep-set eyes that had a melancholy look when you caught them at a certain angle, her unreadable feelings.

Sarah said, ‘We had a chat, yeah.’

‘You didn’t give her my number, did you?’ I asked with some urgency.

‘Now I’d never do that without consulting you first. But that is what I am asking you.’

‘Sarah,’ I said, ‘I don’t feel up to talking with anyone right now. She’s probably forgotten me. She’s probably married to someone sane with a couple of sane children running around. The last thing she needs is to be bugged by the man who dumped her three years ago.’

‘Well—okay. I always imagine old friends want to catch up. The past is just blood under the bridge.’

‘I—I don’t feel at all well at the moment. Maybe we—we could meet up soon.’

‘Name the time and place. I’ve missed you.’

In the end Sarah named the time and place as I’m always hopeless at such arrangements. Unintentional harm is often done by my random choices of location. I always pick the train station where they broke up with the love of their lives on days when they’ve just had a long course of colonic irrigation.

But we didn’t meet. I kept cancelling. Because I was in no fit state, no fit state at all, to interact with healthy humanity. During that call she told me Delph had disappeared again, up in the wastes of Yorkshire. What little contact she had with her father had dwindled to nothing over the years. Her relationship with him was complex and painful and we hadn’t discussed it as much as my greedy, emotional heart would have liked over the years. What was it with me that I had to get to the bottom of everything, that I had a hot and urgent need for elucidation? Why couldn’t I just let it all go?

But I knew why. Because I missed these people, even the ones who had done me wrong. Especially those ones. I had an urgent need to get even, to exact revenge, to inculcate my strongly held beliefs. It was the dear and the good whom I couldn’t face—those to whom I had done wrong myself. The thought of a meeting with Bea had terrified me. Ever since her apparition had floated from the quayside of the subterranean lake in Cephalonia I had been childishly scared of bumping into her on the street, on the bus, at Rock On even. Why? Because I would have nothing to say except sorry a thousand times over. Maybe I was becoming more acute in this, the game of people. Perhaps I was long overdue a harsh lesson in this subject after Mandy. After Sarah’s call I thought about the people I would really miss if I topped myself. Apart from Sarah herself, pitifully few presented themselves to me. Martin, certainly, and possibly Nick. Oh, and Fidel. Christ, would I miss my trusty Fidellino! While Mandy and I had gone into meltdown, Nick and Antonia had kept an aloof distance. During the summer, the happy news that Antonia was pregnant came to us via a text-message. All I could think about at the time was how relieved I was that Mandy had exchanged her milk for gall and was incapable and unwilling to have kids. The situation was hideous and terminal enough as it was. The news didn’t exactly surprise me. If any woman was born to rear children it was that fertile, nurturing, earth-mother, Antonia. It had been abundantly obvious that her job at
Acquisition
was only a way of marking time until her real role in life was undertaken. Nick, aloof and dandyish, guarded about his freedoms, had put off the vexed subject of children for as long as possible. But Antonia, with her fur-lined voice and acres of land where her many dogs, chicken and sheep ran free, was not to be confined to the city for long. She had always talked about moving to the country and becoming a baby-machine, something that Mandy sneered at behind her back.

I had been happy for Nick at the time, but we had lost touch. He knew I was free-floating, that I had been ejected onto the periphery of life by Mandy. I had the loser-dust on my shoulders, thicker than the dandruff on a third-formers collar. That’s why I was surprised when, in early December, he invited me to the Regent for a drink. Of course, I declined. I turned away from his magnanimous gesture. I was deep in the dungeon of despond, loathsome to man or beast. A Quasimodo, unfit for human eyes. But he wasn’t to be deterred. He had something to tell me, so he claimed, that couldn’t be turned away from.

The door to the Prince Regent crunched shut behind me and I saw Nick at once, a pint of Guinness before him, the paper flattened on its front, showing pictures of grimacing footballers. Courteously, he stood and went for his wallet.

‘Lord Byron! Long time no see.’ We shook hands. ‘What are you having?’

‘A triple Bell’s. No ice please,’ I said, feeling lousy, in need of plastic surgery and a full blood transfusion. Nick disappeared to the bar and I surveyed the old familiar joint. Chapel of rest lighting. Mangy carpet. Unattended fruit machine. Unshiftable smoke. Ragged drinkers, looking as if they had been discontinued from the human race. Nothing had changed.

‘Here you are,’ said Nick, carefully unzipping the change purse on his wallet and filling it with coins. ‘Cheers.’

We chinked glasses: his big and brown topped with a meringue of froth, mine small and vinegar-coloured, the glass slightly warm. I took a sip and followed its fire all the way to my stomach.

‘Here’s to marriage,’ I muttered, ‘that sad, sour, sober beverage.’ Three Irish drinkers watched us from the sanctuary of the pool table, probably thinking:
poofs.

‘Christ,’ said Nick, eyeing me intensely, his quiff falling in front of his eyes.

‘What?’

‘Can I say something?’ he asked, a concerned look filling his face, as if he had just noticed a facet of me that he’d never seen before.

‘Sure.’

‘You look—you look terrible.’

I knew this was coming. But it was bracing to have someone else confirm it: a third party that wasn’t my bedsit mirror. I was aware a fortnight of stubble had given the impression that I was trying for an Islamic beard; that Nick may have indeed supposed I had converted and bought a prayer mat. There was the matter of my unslept eyes, shockingly crimson on their inner rims, especially at the bottom where they seemed to be permanently full of fluid. I had also lost a great deal of weight. Unable to contemplate the empty ritual of cooking for one in the months since my break-up, I had subsisted on four-for-a-quid noodles and cheap red wine. Tyre-black smudges had begun to appear under my eyes, with newly revealed dents in my balding scalp also highlighted in the same way. Then there was the matter of my clothes. Nick, a man ever-vigilant for clothing errors or offences, would have been the first to notice that I hadn’t changed out of a toothpaste-spattered jogging top for a fortnight, and that my supermarket trainers in no way matched the frayed black cords. Also that I was wearing no socks, my bare ankles resembling the sad pictures of the dead in war zones, prostrate after being shot by snipers on the way to shops.