Reading Madame Bovary (6 page)

We spent an hour in the pale-blue airport lounge talking in senseless, unmemorable phrases, broken off from time to time as he jumped up and strode away, in his authoritative peaked cap, to look for his father. I was by this time erotically lost to him. After several sorties his eyes had blackened and his skin was flushed. ‘I knew it,' he said. ‘I knew he wouldn't come.' Something heavy in my chest thudded and fell away into space. We altered my flight yet again. Limply I stood by a line of phone booths while he rang his father. The phone didn't answer. He waited for it to ring out and then he rang a hotel in the city and booked a room. We took a cab, saying almost nothing to one another by now. In our hotel room, it was the old Southern Cross, we made love all afternoon. We took no precautions. I thought he might cry after he came the first time but he didn't. His briefcase stood propped absurdly by the door, his soldier's jacket draped across a chair. My chest felt as if a leaden rose had grown within it to fill a cavity I had until then been unaware of. It anchored me to the bed; only my hips were light and floated above me.

In a limbo of dim light and buckled sheets he lay on his back, his pink chest rising and falling. ‘You're beautiful,' he said. He held my hand. ‘I knew he wouldn't come,' he said. ‘In a minute, now, I'll ring his number again …'

One thing I had learned by the time I was thirty: men never get over their fathers.

Some of us live, some of us die

When I was twenty-six, I was hospitalised with pneumonia. It was a ghastly time in my life and I've never been as unhappy since. I was in a destructive love affair and it was killing me. That's why I got sick. For a brief time, propped up in my hospital bed, I thought: Let me die.

How pathetic. Not long after, something happened that made me ashamed of this morbidity.

It began with a bout of pleurisy. My GP examined me and said it would go away. There were too many antibiotics dispensed now and he did not think they were called for in this instance. Not that I blame him, Dr. Richard Wesley-Cameron: tall, slim, handsome, English, mellifluous vowels, a certain edgy manner. Always a little hurried, harassed even, but willing to make home visits, he had come to my flat at around seven on a very dark mid-winter's evening, and found me scarcely able to move from the pain in my chest.

I was in a destructive love affair and it was killing me.

I heard him drive up the long avenue of dark elms that lined the driveway and it was an effort for me to get up from the bed and open the door. A double door, a double lock. I sat tentatively on the edge of the bed in my pink cotton nightdress and black shawl while he examined me. ‘You have pneumonia,' he said. ‘You live alone here?'

‘Yes.'

It was late when the taxi delivered me to the private hospital on the hill overlooking the city. Inside there was an institutional hush. The lights had been dimmed, the corridors were empty. In the front office I registered with a young nurse; the receptionist had long gone home. Then I was led to a room on the second floor, a single room with a high bed. It was after midnight. My suitcase stood unpacked in the corner. I hoisted myself, gasping with pain, onto the high bed and sat upright, my back against four firm pillows, and I sat like this for a long time. No-one came. Outside I could hear the distant traffic, the wind in the trees.

Finally a nurse arrived, stocky and middle-aged. ‘You should be lying down,' she snapped.

‘I can't lie down,' I snapped back. ‘That's why I'm here.'

When I awoke from the warm, drifting sleep brought on by sedatives, a man was standing by my bed. He introduced himself to me as Victor Parish, a cardiac physician, and then he sat on the chair beside my bed. ‘The type of pneumonia you have,' he said, ‘is called pericarditis. The pericardium is a membranous sac enveloping the heart. It's the covering of the heart, the heart's capsule. When it becomes inflamed, usually through a bacterial infection, friction arises and that's the pain you are experiencing now. When I listen to your heart I can hear these friction sounds.'

How clear he is, I thought, how lucid.

‘It's nothing to worry about,' he said. ‘All you need to do is rest.'

For three days I slept through the afternoons in a sleep I have never experienced before or since, a blissful, restorative trance. Dozing in and out of consciousness, floating, light. For three days I slept like this and it seemed as if, each time I awoke, Dr. Parish was sitting by my bed. One afternoon I dreamed that the sac around my heart had swelled up like a balloon and was carrying me off up into the sky. It was not an alarming dream. No danger. Only the sensation of flight, of drifting upwards.

Would it be possible, I wondered, to drift up into death?

Every day he came to see me. Each day he would sit by my bed. Each day it seemed as if he were there a long time, though he was probably present only ten minutes, at most. Dr. Parish, or Mr. Parish, in the protocols of his profession; my heart's rescuer. He was not handsome like Wesley-Cameron but short and plump and bald, with rimless glasses and a quality of immense stillness. He sat with me by the window and looked out. Was he with me only five minutes? It seemed like thirty … an hour … endless. He had golden, freckled hands that lay composed on his lap, and sometimes he gazed out through the glass of the hospital window, as if he had nothing better to do than sit with me. There was something of the sunlight about him, something fair, though he was in late middle-age and solid. Short, corpulent and balding. But definitely of the light. Just to see him made me feel better. Just to have him sit by me, exuding his immense, unfathomable calm. His warm serenity assured me of the inevitability of my survival.

Just a few months after I recovered I read in the papers that his son had been murdered – lured into a park by a mystery phone call and beaten to death. He was my age. From the photograph on the front page I could see that he resembled his father. In the newspaper report, his girlfriend described him as ‘a ray of sunshine'.

I was not a ray of sunshine and yet I had lived. What justice was there in the cosmos when the father should nurse a young woman like me back to health while his own son was taken from him? I said something along these lines to my boss, a kind woman who took an interest in my welfare and found me crying in the staff toilets. ‘You mustn't brood on this,' she said. ‘Some people live, and some people die. And there's no rhyme or reason. It's a mystery.'

It's a mystery, but it haunted me then and it haunts me now.

The day after I got out of hospital I stood on the bus and trembled all the way home, aware that I was, for a time, an inhabitant of some privileged no-man's-land; some body in transit between a receding fragility and a re-emergent strength.

Mr. Parish, you are not forgotten. You are here in the lining of my pericardium, in this heart that is still beating, and I wish you were here now.

Back at the zoo …

At my desk I find that someone has left a stack of new brochures on my keyboard.

* Genderless Negotiation Skills for Women

* Preparing and Delivering Perfect Presentations

* How to Handle Employees with Attitude Problems

* How to Become Successful Taught by People Who Are
(The Seminar of a Lifetime)

* Empowering Your Employees to Reach Peak Performance

* Getting Everything Done – How to Avoid and Overcome
the ‘Top
10
Time Thieves'

* Designing Corporate Culture – How to Convert Vicious Cycles to Virtuous Cycles. ‘Management is not about command and control but designing and managing the culture of a place. If you create a good culture you release energy that's latent in the group. Many managers focus too much on tasks and not on the culture that would help the tasks to get done.'

I know where these have come from. Winton has put them there. I file the brochures away under
Miscellaneous
.

This is how I spend my lunch hours. I spend my lunch hours paying bills, shopping for kids' clothes, replacing lost lunch-boxes, looking for Hallowe'en hats, collecting dry-cleaning, buying Happy Anniversary or Get Well Soon cards. Jogging – half-walking half-running – up Hunter Street in my high heels, trying to pack two hours into an hour, eating standing up at the yoghurt and fruit-salad bar in the crowded basement of Centre-point, resenting those languid men who take ten-minute lunch breaks or skip lunch altogether to beef up their flex time until they can have an afternoon windsurfing or walking their greyhounds!

This reminds me. The pains in my chest are getting worse. I am beginning to feel a creeping panic.

Frank says, ‘Have you got pain in the arm?'

‘No, I haven't. Why?'

‘It's a sign of heart trouble,' he says. ‘Otherwise, it's probably stress or indigestion. You do bolt your food down, Kay.'

‘That's because I'm always in a hurry, or being interrupted.'

I ring up Diana. ‘Have you found me that yoga class?' I ask. Or perhaps I just need a night at the Russell Hotel.

Romance offshore

The first time.

The first time that Frank and I sought solace in a private hotel we skipped dinner. The women's magazines tell you that going out to a quiet, intimate dinner is an ‘opportunity to talk to your partner'. The last thing we wanted to do that night was talk to one another.

We parked high above the Rocks on Miller's Point, under the plane trees and beside the historic sandstone terraces. Then we walked down the steep hill and under the stone archway beside the steep bank cut out of rock. Instinctively, we walked slightly apart, as if we did not quite know one another.

I wanted to have a cocktail in the coldly modern and impersonal harbourside Hilton, in the bland and soulless mezzanine bar full of cane chairs. There was a moment on this impersonal balcony when I thought our stratagem wouldn't work. I looked out over the black-and-white floor tiles and the long vases filled with bird of paradise stems. Frank seemed stilted, a little awkward, a little withdrawn. I felt separate from him. I didn't want to know his worries. To have solicited his confidences at that point would have been fatal. Empathy is fatal to sex. That kind of sex. Hotel sex.

Next we strolled down to a rowdy wine bar, almost next door to our destination. The bar was a better class of pick-up joint. There was beer on the floor; it was noisy. Here I had a moment of restlessness, an impulse to take control, to say ‘It's noisy here, let's go to the hotel,' but I resisted. I wanted to prolong the moment, to be passive, and floating, free of time. Free of my relentless schedule. It had to be a timeless moment. This is what being young is about, every moment is like every other moment, which is why sex is so good when you're young. It's not true to say that it gets better as you get older. For childless narcissists, maybe, for everyone else it gets tired, gets
fitted in
. When you're nineteen it expands to fill the time available; it swarms over everything, a haze over every page of every book, a certain kind of humid light in your dreams, a sense of possibility. Now, in our assignation, Frank and I had to
make
our sense of possibility, to artificially generate that haze.

In the bar I gazed out the window, beyond any of the bodies there. Through the red bubble-glass in the window I could see the quay, the red, bubbling water.

At last he took my elbow in a firm grip and looked in the direction of the door. It was a look that in another context might have been risible but it was right for this moment. I left my half-drunk glass of red wine – lipstick-rimmed, inconsequential, a token – behind on the table, a glass-topped table with puddles of beer slops and flecks of dried cappuccino froth. I liked the word,
froth
. Froth was a word for that moment. A carnal word. It suggested a prick off the leash. His. A frivolous, unaccountable cunt. Mine.

On another night I might have taken an interest in the waiter behind the bar – lean and dark, in an expensive white shirt and wearing that cool look of hostile distraction that young men assume behind bar counters – but not that night, that night I was looking nowhere special, looking only within my own body heat; an unfocused, erotic blindness.

We went up a narrow staircase painted grey and yellow to a small, discreet reception desk and then into the room. It was an old room with a high ceiling in panels of ornately moulded tin. I stood beneath the whirring ceiling-fan and the light breeze caught at my hair. The walls, and almost everything else in the room, were in shades of smoky pink, an insinuating pink, the colour of tumescence, except for the brass bed, in black and gold. There was an old iron fire-grate surrounded by mosaic tiles and on the mantel two vases stuffed with masses of fake smoky pink-and-white orchids, and between them a Picasso print of a barefoot girl, her back turned, stroking some weird headless animal, suggestive of a greyish-black dog, her hand resting on its phallic neck. A large cedar mirror opposite the bed, an old oak wardrobe in the French style, an armoire. A deliberate style of louche luxury.

Outside was noise, and traffic. Drunks singing in the pub on the corner spilled out onto the footpath in the warm night air, while trains thundered past at window height, the glass rattling, shaking, vibrating in spasms, the bridge looming from a corner of the quay.

Frank sank to his knees and groaned softly. I was taken by surprise. He'd never done this before. He hitched my skirt up and I bent at the knees, he lifted his arms to push my top up over my breasts. A second train rumbled past the window, high up, on its track towards the bridge. I saw its red lights flicker through the slatted blinds, and I knew it was going to work, it was going to be one of the good nights in our life together; sublimely intimate, sublimely impersonal.

We arrived home at midnight, in a satiated trance. But it was a strategy, and a world, of diminishing returns, and each time the charge grew weaker. The second time, there were no rooms available at The Russell and I bit my lip in disappointment, like a child. Someone at work had suggested a small boutique hotel in Kings Cross. The room was large and painted in pale blue, pale apricot and a dull cream. There were blue floral curtains and a grey-white marble fireplace. Genteel.