Our Tragic Universe (40 page)

Something popped in the fire, and B and I both jumped. Then there was a howling sound outside. It was the wind, blowing around the house and down the chimney. I went to the kitchen to get a tangerine. I ate it, then threw the peel in the fire. There was a little hiss and then all was quiet again.

The pattern I’d chosen for my Tarot reading was an imaginary hexagram with the cards at each of the six points. At first I thought I should read the cards clockwise, but in fact from the top going clockwise, the cards are numbered 1, 5, 2, 4, 3, 6. In this sequence, the first card represents the central issue, or the ‘ordinary world’ of the problem; the second represents the problem itself; the third represents the way to set out and resolve the issue; the fourth represents a previously unseen element in the central conflict that could make the problem seem insurmountable; the fifth represents a climax or turning point; and the sixth the resolution. I said all this to myself as I laid out the cards, and only when the pattern was formed did I realise that this exercise, whatever it revealed, would be ideal for an Orb Books retreat. This was a story-formula all over again. There is a problem, so you try to solve it. Although it goes well at first, there is something surprising about the problem that makes it more difficult to solve than you first thought.
There is a moment when all seems to be lost, in the climax; but then the solution is found and the problem is overcome. If I could get ghostwriters to plot stories like this, with some Tarot cards, it would be good practice for them. But I felt a little sick as I thought of this.

In order from 1 to 6, my cards were as follows: Ace of Cups; Prince of Cups (reversed); the Star; Three of Wands (reversed); Three of Pentacles; and Justice (reversed). This, when I interpreted it, suggested that I wanted to set out for a great truth, something very worth while, as expressed by the Ace of Cups, but at the end I didn’t want to come to a final judgement. I was somehow rejecting the Justice card, which is why it was reversed. In order to come to this non-conclusion, I needed balance, not dishonesty. I wanted to ask a question, but not answer it. Perhaps I wanted to create a storyless story. How that would work in my feature I wasn’t sure. But I did suddenly realise that all the self-help books I’d rejected for being offensive or stupid were offensive or stupid precisely because they would take the Fool, about to step off his cliff, and they would stop him. They would put him and his dog in therapy and turn him back towards the ‘real world’, with its winding roads with signs pointing only to love, money and success. Then the doorbell rang and all my furniture arrived.

The delivery men took the flat-pack bed and mattress upstairs, but left the other boxes in the hallway. It took me half an hour to move them into the front room. Then I went back upstairs. The box of bed-parts was so heavy I couldn’t move it. In the end I opened it haphazardly and about fifty pieces of pale wood fell on the floor, along with a bag containing a million billion screws and other metal objects, and a piece of paper with a
picture of a bed on it. I couldn’t even open the box properly; what chance was there that I would actually put all this stuff together? I tried sifting through the pieces and looking at the diagram, but it was no good; I didn’t even know which way up anything went. I went downstairs and looked for Tim’s number. I remembered that I needed to reply to Josh, not that I knew what to say. It was just like him to want to book a restaurant twelve days before an event.

Tim was in the
Yellow Pages
, under ‘Handymen’. I rang the number. A woman – I assumed it was Heidi – answered.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Is Tim there?’

‘No, sorry,’ she said. ‘Who is this?’

‘It’s Meg Carpenter. I’m working with him on his book; he’s probably mentioned me. Although really I wanted some help with a flat-pack. I guess he’s on Dartmoor already?’

‘What book?’ said Heidi. ‘Hello, by the way. I’m Heidi; Tim’s wife.’

‘Gosh,’ I said. ‘Sorry if I’ve …’

‘He never said anything about a book. That’s great.’

‘It is,’ I said. ‘It’s very …’

‘God. How embarrassing.’ She laughed. ‘How stupid.’

‘Huh?’

‘How embarrassing and stupid to not know what your own husband is doing. Is it a good book?’

‘Yeah. Well, it’s a proposal at the moment. It will be good, I’m sure.’

‘And you say he’s on Dartmoor?’

‘Honestly, I wouldn’t know,’ I said. ‘It was a guess. I …’

Heidi laughed. ‘I thought he was having an affair.’

‘Um …’

‘Sorry. I shouldn’t tell you any of this. But I’m so glad he isn’t having an affair. Isn’t that pathetic? Unless, of course, you’re his mistress and I’m making an even bigger fool of myself.’ She sighed. ‘What’s he doing on Dartmoor?’

‘He’s researching a Beast,’ I said.

‘Not the one from the local paper? Oh, God.’

‘I’m sure it’ll be OK.’

‘How can you say that? It’s almost worse. I thought he was having an affair, and he’s actually out there with some wild animal. Not that anyone feels safer inside, because apparently it finds ways into people’s houses. Sorry – Meg, wasn’t it? You’ve caught me at a strange moment, and I’m really rather embarrassed. I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be, please,’ I said. ‘But look, I’m sure he had a good reason. What did you mean about—’

‘You know, he accused me of having an affair once,’ she said. ‘Years ago, when we lived in London. I’d gone for dinner a couple of times with a colleague, and he thought that meant I must be sleeping with him. Now this. God.’

While Heidi was talking I’d walked to my front door, opened it as quietly as I could and rung the doorbell.

‘Oh, sorry –
Hang on!
– Heidi, that’s the door. I’ve got to go. Will you tell Tim I phoned? Sorry again. Got to go. Hope everything works out. Bye.’

I went to the village shop and got a Phillips screwdriver, a flat-head screwdriver, some more lemons, some bubble bath and the local paper. Gill didn’t say anything at all, but shook her
head a couple of times as she searched for the price on the flat-head screwdriver. I looked again at the books on the display behind the counter.

‘It’s Gill, isn’t it?’ I said to her.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And you’re Meg?’

I smiled. ‘Yep. Sorry I keep buying such weird stuff.’

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘We sell quite “weird stuff”.’ She smiled too.

‘OK. Well, I need some more of those books. I’d like the one on embroidery, the one on building bat-houses, the one on watercolour painting and the one on birdwatching, please.’

When I got in I made some notes on my feature, but I still wasn’t sure how to make it work. Then I went upstairs and put all the pieces of the bed into piles, and read the instructions twice. I realised I needed an electric screwdriver as well as the two I’d bought from the shop, so I went to borrow one from Andrew. I stayed for a quick fish stew and a pint of Beast. Then I went home to get on with my feature. I’d just settled down on the sofa with the sack of self-help books and the new books I’d bought from the village shop when my phone vibrated. There was a message from Libby:
I feel like a Stepford Wife. How
are you? I’ve had sex three times today! Now I want to shoot myself
.

I added one more small log to the fire, and for a while it crackled in the fireplace, before settling into a kind of
Wishhh
noise, with the sea outside going
Shushhh
as the wind died down. I took out my Moleskine notebook and started writing, and the sound of my fountain pen on the thick pages was
Hushhh
. Wish, shush, hush. I wrote for two hours without stopping. Then I plugged in my laptop, made another cup of coffee and started typing, still surrounded by books with increasing numbers of
Post-it notes stuck in them. When my feature was completely done and the fire had settled into a glow, I settled down to sleep with B on the sofa, thinking about what I’d written and hoping Oscar would publish it and Vi would read it, with the fire still
wishing
, and projecting its own shadowy stories onto the walls.

I’d first met Vi on a drunken evening after a research seminar that Frank had given on Chekhov’s letters and literary technique. One of my lecturers, Tony, was sitting next to an attractively weathered-looking woman I’d never seen before, who was wearing purple jeans, a Greenpeace T-shirt and big black DMs. She had the kind of tan you don’t ever get in England, and several necklaces made from string and exotic-looking stones. After the seminar was over Frank invited everybody for a drink, but I was the only person who could make it apart from Tony and the mysterious woman, whom Frank then introduced as ‘my other half: Violet Hayes, from anthropology’. Tony laughed at this, clapped Frank on the shoulder and said, ‘Other half? Anthropology? How
sweet
.’

A drink turned into dinner in an Italian place down a side-street, and we all smoked and drank red wine as if we were immortal. The only person who didn’t smoke was Vi, but she threw back her wine just as fast as the rest of us.

‘Sometimes I yearn for a cigarette,’ she said. ‘Just one.’

Tony laughed. ‘Chekhov gave up smoking eventually, didn’t he?’ he said to Frank. ‘Didn’t he say it had stopped him being gloomy and nervous?’

‘Yeah,’ Frank said. ‘I hope that happens when I give up.’

‘He went off Tolstoy as a direct result of giving up smoking, too, didn’t he?’ Vi said. ‘I remembered that because I kind of went off certain things when I gave up. Like bad detective novels, for example.’ She grinned. ‘Hardly Tolstoy, but.’

Vi spoke English with the kind of accent that has evolved in a variety of different directions, like an adaptively radiated species. As I got to know her better I would begin to recognise or guess some of the origins of her different ways of constructing sentences. Using ‘but’ at the end of a sentence instead of ‘though’ was Antipodean – I knew this from watching soap operas, and from listening to Frank, who was Australian.

‘Yeah,’ said Frank. ‘Sadly they didn’t agree on the fundamental nature of existence. Tolstoy thought it was spiritual; Chekhov thought it was material. More or less.’ He looked at me. ‘Do you know Chekhov’s letters, Meg?’

‘No. I mean, I didn’t before today. I’ll get the book out of the library now, though. The letters sound great. So why exactly did he go off Tolstoy? How could anyone go off Tolstoy?’ We’d reached Tolstoy on Frank’s course, but not Chekhov.

‘It was a class thing mainly,’ Frank said. ‘Chekhov was already making a distinction between his kind of writing and Tolstoy’s in the letter I was talking about before, when he says Tolstoy and Turgenev are “fastidious” with their morals. Chekhov hated this. It wasn’t just that he was a doctor. He came from a very poor background and most of his writing was done to make money to stop his family from starving. He supported them all throughout his life. His two older brothers were alcoholics, and didn’t help much at all. He was very well acquainted with the lives of the lower classes: dirt, poverty – the “dung-heap” of life. He saw something too morally simplistic, or maybe naïve, in
Tolstoy – or at least he said he did before he met him properly. Chekhov valued progress. He said something like “There is more love for mankind in electricity and steam than there is in chastity and abstaining from meat.” I’ve been intrigued by that remark ever since I read it. Tolstoy, being rich, thinks that living like a peasant is virtuous in its simplicity. But Chekhov’s been there and done that. He’s eaten goose soup so thin that he says the only substance in it is like the scum you get in a bath after fat market women have been in it. He has slept in troughs. He was thrilled to leave his parochial home town, Taganrog, and loved spending time in St Petersburg, where there were proper intellectuals and good food. He doesn’t have any romantic ideas about peasants and the countryside. It’s interesting to compare his story “Peasants” with the sections in
Anna Karenina
where Levin thinks he will become enlightened if he works hard, like a peasant. But in Chekhov’s story peasant life is simply dull, boring and painful. He became close to Tolstoy, of course, and they got on very well. Chekhov always looked up to him in some ways.’