Love Doesn't Work (8 page)

“I suppose the cleaners have gone?”

“Yes. Jimmy won’t pay the alimony. He’s bitter about things. His new wife is an heiress. They’re loaded.”

“He did give you the house, though.”

“Only because he didn’t want it. He hates this place. Anyway, what’s a house? It’s just a pile of stone, with a roof on top. Somewhere you can put your things. A house isn’t food or money. Speaking of which, do you mind doing some shopping? I’m flat broke.”

“Yes, in a minute.” I refocused on the problem. “It’s a big house, though. You could sell it.”

“This pile of shit? It leaks, and the municipality is challenging the planning permission. They say it was obtained illegally. I suppose Jimmy greased someone’s palm. That’s what he always does. No one would ever buy it. The trouble with you and all English people is that you think too much about houses. You think I’m fine because I’ve got a house, don’t you? Meanwhile I could be hanging myself, but at least I’ve got a house to leave to my children. Except I don’t even have any bloody children thanks to fucking Jimmy. Bastard.” At this point her lips began to quiver.

“Well, mental sex was hardly going to prove very useful in that respect, was it? Although by the time we have children most of us are already going mental, it’s got to be admitted.”

Archie closed her eyes in exasperation. “Oh shut up, Chuck, you talk like a bloody queer sometimes! You’d never get a woman pregnant, would you? You’d never lose control, and you’d never fuck anyone unless you were wearing a triple-glazed fucking condom. You’re not passionate, you’re derivative. That’s why you never got anywhere in the arts! I suppose you’re some kind of editor.”

“I haven’t been as unsuccessful as some!” I threw back. “And I did come here to see you, which counts for something, doesn’t it?”

There was a pause, then, with much rolling of eyes, she said, “Oh Chuck! What do you know about children anyway?”

“Not much, thank God,” I said.

“So spare me your wisdom. Can I tell you something about Jimmy instead? Can I?”

“If you like.”

“Don’t get sniffy just because I say what I think. That’s why you came, isn’t it? To find out the truth?”

“Is it?”

“Oh balls! I’m going to tell you about Jimmy whether you like or not.” She dropped her voice, as if what she were saying were shameful. “Jimmy was impotent. Completely. There was something wrong with his you know what. It just hung there. It took a bloody miracle to get it up. No wonder my cheekbones looked slightly hollow back then. My cheek-muscles were bloody buff.”

“Let’s stay off the subject of sex and try to be constructive,” I said.

“Oh stop it you old fag! Why is it better?”

“I’m not a fag, Archie. And by the way, I’m not an editor either. I’m a publisher.”

“Who cares, Chuck? Who except you in this world actually cares what job you do? We were talking about sex. We only ever talk about sex. I’m not available for that sort of thing any more. I’m not into it.”

“You never were, as far as I can see, apart from some histrionics.”

“Fuck you, Chuck. You’re a real bitch.”

“It’s just the way I talk.”

“No, it’s the way you think and it’s the way you feel about people, and it’s really sad to see a man in his best years all twisted up like this. It’s boarding school, isn’t it? Being held down and fucked up the arse at thirteen. Not a good start, right?”

We sat in silence. I was awake now, looking out at the terrace. Funny, now that the place was crumbling I actually preferred it. It had taken on some soul.

“So why didn’t he just take Viagra?”

“He did sometimes.”

“And?”

“Oh it was bloody awful. Like going to bed with a broomstick.”

“His new wife seemed happy enough.”

“How do you know? Did you fuck her as well?”

“No, Jimmy said he’d never let me near her.”

She paused, rubbed her eyes, and said, “So in the end we gave up sex. I wanted to save the marriage so I came up with mental sex. Jimmy went for it, or played along with it, more likely.”

“Shame. I thought it was an interesting concept.”

“It would have been interesting if it had worked. I guess Jimmy felt divorce would have been too expensive. Anyway we only saw each other for a few days now and then. He must have been seeing other women.” She nodded to herself. “He probably just found me totally repugnant.”

“I doubt that, Archie. You’re gorgeous.”

“I don’t need bolstering,” she said. “But thanks all the same.”

“Then I came along. And I liked you, didn’t I?”

“Yes, that’s when I saw my chance to stir things up.”

“Did it?”

“You’ve no idea. Jimmy was more or less deranged. Poor guy, it must be hard not to be able to get your cock up. It’s the revenge of all women, isn’t it? First no orgasms, then childbirth.”

I stood up, and started putting on yesterday’s clothes. “Think I’ll go and buy some breakfast things.”

“Nothing’s open yet. Come and have stale bread. We can toast it. And I think there’s tea. No fresh milk though, only UHT.”

“Delicious.”

“When you do go out, if you see a scruffy guy with a beard following you, don’t speak to him.”

“Who is he?”

“Some guy I met in India at the ashram.”

“Is he dangerous?”

“No, just mad. And he loves me. Avoid him, please.”

She stood up and left the room. I shuffled along behind her, slightly disgruntled and wondering why I had come. Why had I come, why had I come? Was it just the sex we’d had, the intimacy? If so, I had been an utter fool. This woman was so over me she might as well be a cloud drifting above, oblivious to my pathetic longings.

XII

Archie’s warning was apt. When I got to the place known locally as the supermarket, which was about the size of a London tobacconist’s, there was a man following me, or at least watching me from the deli counter: a bearded, emaciated ginger-nut with dirty long hair and anxious, pale-blue eyes. He looked like a nervous stork in a wig and sandals.

I confronted him politely. “May I help you?”

He stepped back, as if I’d assaulted him. Then said, in a Pythonesque manner, “What? Help me? Do you want to help me?”

“I asked you a question. I said, may I help you?”

“That’s just Pom for fuck off. I know that much.” His eyes were watering so profusely they looked in danger of dissolving.

“Who are you? Why are you following Archie?”

“Why do you care? And what’s it got to do with you?” He was puffing himself up now, hostile and self-righteous.

“I’m her friend and I am here to help her.”

“Oh, that sounds like me! She needs help, conniving bitch! You’ll see for yourself.” His unwashed face loomed close, whispering, “If I run into you again I won’t be so understanding, old chap!”

“Is that a threat?”

He smiled, showing a set of yellow fangs. “Oh dear, not so big now, are you! Want me to get you some nappies?” Then he walked out.

Nervously I bought eggs, prosciutto, pecorino cheese, green tomatoes, olives, espresso coffee, tea, semi-skimmed milk, cheap table wine, a bottle of good Grappa, three loaves of bread, pasta, biscuits, toilet rolls, sponges and a few other items, then, keeping my eyes open for assailants with blunt weapons, headed back to the Bond pod.

Archie was waiting by the front door when I walked in.

“He was there, wasn’t he?” she said. “You spoke to him.”

“How did you know?”

“He came steaming down the road about ten minutes ago, stood below in the lane shouting obscenities, then threw a stone.”

“Something about this house makes people want to throw stones at it.”

“He broke a window. I told you not to speak to him! He’s mad.”

“You said he wasn’t dangerous, remember! By the way, he said you were a conniving bitch, and I’d find out soon enough.”

Archie closed the door and bolted it. We threaded our way through a bewildering sequence of open-plan rooms as she spoke over her shoulder: “Of course he did. Men always say that sort of thing when you leave them.”

“What were you doing with him in the first place?”

“Do shut up, Chuck.”

We entered the stainless steel kitchen, which was exactly like a restaurant kitchen except for the show-off fittings, slate worktops, brash and branded appliances and brass grilles sunk into a fuck-off limestone floor. The windows overlooked the boundary of the town, marked out by a high stone wall. On the other side was a hillside garden where old men grew flowers, beans and artichokes. Beyond them a few mountains, then the sea hovering under the sky.

Everything was a bloody mess, of course. Once people get used to having staff they’re always inordinately lazy. I put the things in the fridge after I had cleared out some rotten items and given it a wipe-down with one of the new sponges.

Archie seemed oblivious to my bustling activity. She sat on the worktop, frowning. “I’ve just realized I completely hate him,” she said. “I thought he was just an annoyance. My God, I’m starting to think he could be the biggest problem of all. At least Jimmy doesn’t come round to throw stones at the house.”

“You’d better come back with me to London. Hadn’t you?” I said.

“What for?”

“To avoid being killed?”

“Don’t be silly,” she sniggered. “Bertie’s crazy about me. All he’d do is try and rape me in his very own, inept way.”

“Oh, rape you, that’s all right then. My God, it’s a seesaw world with you, isn’t it! One bloke can’t get it up, the next one wants to rape you.” I looked round, exasperated. “Archie, do you ever wash up?”

“What’s the point. Things just get dirty again.”

“We’ll have to call the cleaner later. I’ll pay her myself.”

“We can’t. I owe her two hundred euro. Let’s go upstairs.”

We headed up the spiral staircase. Over my shoulder I said, “So, this Bertie? What was he doing in India?”

“Finding God.”

“And in the end all he found was little old you. Poor little mite.”

“He got confused, didn’t he?”

She led me into Jimmy’s “thinking room”—that was his name for it. If the room wasn’t exactly bursting with intellectual energy, it was certainly an inflated expression of money, that commodity so desired in the world but only ever obtained by a small minority who, once they’ve attained it, immediately start fretting and convincing themselves they’re broke.

I stopped in the doorway, impressed in spite of myself.

The room was large but broken up by a pair of sofas, cream-colored and spotlessly clean. Quite exquisite. Joined seamlessly onto the back of them were flimsy screens of woven silk that stretched up in an organic Spiderman design, until they merged with the ceiling, They were studded with bands of various colors and functioned almost as see-through partitions.

There was an electric fireplace set into the wall, its silvery back studded with crystals turned on by flicking a switch on the wall. It had two settings, each marked with a symbol, one for heat and another for light. The light it gave off had a sort of rippling, lunar effect. It drove me insane.

“This is stunning,” I said. “Really!”

“The thing about Jimmy was that he found it hard to live with normal furniture,” said Archie. “He didn’t like furniture.”

“Oh he seemed to like it well enough,” I said, with slight venom. “I suppose he got an interior designer to do all this?”

“No, he hates them as well. He chose everything himself. In New York.”

I sat down heavily in the sofa, flummoxed by this airy pocket of controlled perfection, while at the same time infuriated by the self-regard of the rich, their anally retentive need for opulence and everything just right.

“If you have a mind you don’t need all this. Do you?” I said.

“Jimmy has a mind. As you know, Chuck. It’s just a mind that’s very concerned with things.”

There was a silence, while my eyes dwelt on Jimmy’s investments. Leaning against the wall by the window were seven large beaten copper panels decorated with concentric circles, some of them breaking right through the copper, others scratched into the surface. Again, totally exquisite, and this time I happened to recognize them. They were by Jacob Verlaine, a voguish New York artist. A pair of them had recently sold for forty thousand dollars at Sotheby’s. One of the panels lay on the floor, with a chair carelessly placed on top of it and an empty tea-cup.

“Have you been sitting on that? You shouldn’t. They’re very valuable.”

“Oh who gives a monkey’s about his stuff?”

I lifted the chair away and picked up the panel. The chair-leg had made an imprint in the copper. Carefully I leaned it beside the others.

“No one will even notice,” said Archie with a yawn.

At the opposite end of the room was a semi-bald, Egyptian cat lying on one of the sofas. I only noticed it when it started making retching sounds.

“Oh dear,” said Archie. “She’s not well, I think she ate something funny.”

I went over and picked it up with distaste—I have to admit I hate cats—and threw it out of the door. “Archie! You have to wake up. You must start sorting the situation out! You can’t just vandalize the place and live here like a down-and-out!”

“Oh shut up!”

“You shut up! Listen to me! If you don’t, you’re finished.”

“I am finished. I wanted to be with Jimmy, I wanted to have a child with him,” she wailed.

“Why the hell did you marry an impotent man if you wanted a child?”

“He wasn’t impotent at the beginning. He just became impotent. And the more impotent he became, the more determined he was to marry me. And then I spent years making love to a fucking snail!”

“Archie! I’m beginning to think you made him impotent.”

“Oh for God’s sake, you’re really offending me now.”

By this point I was standing over her, looking down at her upturned face. How sad to think there had been a time when she drove me to distraction. I grabbed her wrists. “Do you enjoy driving men berserk?”

“You prick, you’re no different from the rest of them! Go on then, fuck me! I don’t even care.”

I pushed her back into the sofa, pinned her down and forced my knee between her legs. Then I came to my senses, let go of her and sat down next to her. “Sorry, I don’t know what happened.”