The Ends of Our Tethers (2 page)

I
PHONE OUR ADMINISTRATOR and say that in ten minutes I will bring her the overdue assessments. She says, “Thank you, Doctor Gowry. And will you also bring the introduction to the new handbook?”

“That will take a little longer, Karen, perhaps another hour.”

“Then don't bother bringing me all these things today. Leave the assessed portfolios and introduction in my front-office pigeon hole when you go home tonight. I'll process them first thing tomorrow.”

“Thank you Karen, that would be much more convenient.”

“I'm
Phyllis
, Doctor Gowry. Karen left three months ago.”

“Haha, so she did. Sorry, Phyllis.”

I finish assessing the portfolios on my desk, look for the others and remember I took them home three days ago. Never mind. I'll rise early tomorrow and bring them to the front office before Karen arrives. So now I tackle the introduction, though I fear this job is getting beyond me and I should apply for something less demanding. Which reminds me that I
have
applied for another job, with Human Resources, and must soon attend an interview for it. But first, the introduction. This should be easy. I need only bring the introduction to last year's handbook up to date by changing a word here or there.

But revising the old introduction turns out to be almost impossible. I wrote it only a year ago but the language now strikes me as long-winded official jargon, misleading when not practically meaningless. It was written to attract folk with money into an organisation I now want to leave, but surely that can be done in a few simple, honest sentences? I try and try to write them and have almost glimpsed how to do it when I see the the time is nearly four P.M! My interview with Human Resources is at four fifteen! If I run to the
main road and catch a taxi at once I can still be in time so
run
.

Rain is falling, every passing taxi is engaged, at ten past four I decide to phone Human Resources, apologise, blame the weather and if possible postpone the interview. I rush into a familiar pub and find the public telephone has been replaced by a flashing machine that gives the users an illusion of shooting people. I groan. A man I know asks why. I say, “No telephone.”

“Use my mobile,” he says, holding out what looks like a double nine domino.

“Thank you – thank you – but I don't know how to use such a machine.”

“I'll dial for you. What number?”

I cannot tell him, for the number is in a diary on my office desk. He offers to dial directory enquiries but, suddenly full of black certainty that I have now no chance of the Human Resources job, instead I order a large whisky for each of us.

He says, “Thanks. Cheers. You seem troubled. Tell me your woes.”

I do so in great detail, during which he buys us each another drink. At last he says, “Remarkable. Remarkable. But why apply
to Human Resources? It doesn't even figure in the Dow Jones index. You're a metallurgist so you should apply to Domestic Steel. It died in the late sixties but a renaissance is due and your age and experience would make you a valuable link with the past.”

I ponder these words and find that they also strike me as meaningless official jargon. I order another round of drinks and tell him I mainly regret losing my chance with Human Resources because of my wife. She feels my job with Scottish Arterial is killing me. The man says, “I suspect you need a total change of scene. Any plans for a holiday this year?”

I say, “Not this year,” and explain that my wife hates leaving home, even for a few days, because she is sure we cannot afford it. She says such suggestions threaten our marriage and make her feel I am battering her. I then notice it is twenty minutes to ten, say goodbye and leave, but as usual nowadays I call for a quick drink at two or three other pubs on my way home.

I open our front door shortly after midnight and hear gentle snoring from the darkened bedroom. I undress without
switching on the light but the window curtains are not completely drawn. By gleams from a street lamp outside I see a tumbler of clear liquid on my wife's bedside table. Is it water? Gin? Vodka? Does she drink as much alcohol in my absence as I do in hers? I refrain from investigating and slip in beside her. The rhythm of her snores alters slightly as she snuggles cosily against me. I lie basking in that cosiness. This is now the pleasantest part of my life; perhaps it always was. She mutters something that sounds like “I wish she had chosen a different star.”

“Who are you talking about?” I ask. She is obviously talking in her sleep, but even then can sometimes answer questions. After a moment she mutters that they're burying the bird.

“What bird?” I ask, trying to imagine the dream she is having. After a while she says, “A swan.”

Her dreams are as impenetrable as my own.

I continue basking in her warmth, dimly haunted by a feeling that tomorrow I should rise early and do something. I cannot remember what, but Karen will know. Karen
is amazingly efficient and good at covering up for me; besides, nowadays in Britain no professional person as close to retiral as I am is ever sacked for inefficiency.

I wait patiently for sleep
to cover me all up
like a cloak.

B
EFORE TALKING ABOUT Tilda I'll mention earlier wives. Wife 1 was an ordinary tidy home-lover. We met at secondary school and after leaving it she let us make love then refused to allow any more of that unless we married. So we married. Wife 2 was a bossy manager, wife 3 very quiet and messy. I married all of them because it made us feel more secure for a while and separated from them without fuss or fighting, so I am obviously no Bluebeard. Indeed, most of my life has passed in sexual loneliness which makes me hopeful when a new affair looks like starting, as happened a year ago.

In the park near my home I saw a couple stand quarrelling under a tree. No
one else was in sight but they were yards away from me and I expected to pass without being noticed. Instead the woman rushed over to me saying, “Please help me, sir, that man is frightening me.”

“Good riddance!” shouted the man and hurried away leaving us facing each other.

She was in her late teens or early twenties, big and beautiful in a plain undecorated way, with short brown hair and a determined expression that showed she was no victim. Victims don't attract me. Her clothes were of very good quality and conventional in a smart country-wear style, yet seemed slightly odd, either because they did not perfectly match or were more suited to an older woman. The silence between us grew embarrassing. I asked if she would like a coffee. She seized my hand saying, “Lead the way,” and I found us walking toward a hotel outside the park gates, gates through which the man who had shouted at us was rapidly vanishing without a backward glance. We walked side by side so easily that I thought she was leading me, though later I found she knew nothing of the neighbourhood. I asked her name. She said, “Mattie or
Tilda, take your pick.”

“Surname?”

“
That
,” she said emphatically, “is what they want me not to advertise. The less said about
that
the better you cunt.”

Her loud clear voice had the posh accent that strikes most Scottish ears as English. I decided she was an eccentric aristocrat and suddenly, because I am a conventional soul, had no wish to take her to a hotel lounge or anywhere public. I suggested going to my place. She said, “Lead on,” so I did.

We had not far to go and as we swung along she murmured, “Cunt cunt. Cunt cunt,” very quietly to herself as if hoping no one heard. That excited me. My flat is a large bed-sitting room, workroom, bathroom and kitchen. She stood in the largest room and announced, “This is certainly more salubrious than that other man's place.”

As I helped to remove her coat she whispered, “You cunt,” which I took as an invitation to help her out of more garments. She muttered, “Right, carry on.”

I led her to the bed. What followed was so simple and satisfying that afterwards I lay
completely relaxed for the first time in years, almost unable to believe my good luck.

“And now,” she said, lying flat on her back and talking loudly as if to the ceiling, “I want apple tart with lots and lots of cream on top.
Ice
cream.”

“Your wish is my command,” I said jumping up and dressing.

The nearest provision store was a street away. I returned in less than fifteen minutes and found her in the middle of the floor, clutching her hair and dressed as if her clothes had been thrust on in panic. She screamed, “
Where have you
been
?”

“Buying what you ordered,” I said, displaying tart and ice cream. She slumped grumpily into a chair while I prepared them in the kitchen. Later, while eating, I asked what had made her hysterical. She said, “You left me alone in this strange house and I thought you would come back hours later stinking of whisky and wanting us to do it again.”

I did want us to do it again but was not greedy enough to insist. I told her I was a freelance programmer who worked at home and I detested booze because my
dad had been alcoholic. She looked pleased then said slowly and slyly, “Regarding the dad situation, ditto. Ditto but if disorder is confined to the family apartments others do not notice. And if you too detest alcohol and work at home like all sensible people it is possible, cunt, that you may be possible.”

I laughed at that and said, “Possibly you are too. Where are you from?”

“I have already said they do not want me to say.”

I explained that I was not interested in her disgustingly snobbish family but assumed she had not been long in Glasgow. She said cautiously, “Until the day before yesterday, or maybe the day before that, I occupied a quite nice caravan in a field of them. People came and went. Mostly went.”

“There must have been a town or village near your caravan park.”

“There was a village and the sea but neither was convenient. I ate in a hotel called The Red Fox. I met the man who brought me here in The Red Fox. He turned out to be most unpleasant, not my sort at all.”

“Have you things in his house? Things you want to collect?”

“What things?”

“A nightgown? Clothes?”

“No. Certainly not. Not at all. Please don't be a …” She hesitated then said quickly, “cunt give me a glass of milk.”

It is almost impossible to judge the intelligence of someone from an alien culture so I have never discovered exactly how stupid or mad Tilda is. She behaved as if she expected to live with me. I wanted that too so it was hardly a sign of
her
insanity. Lunatics are supposed to have delusions. Tilda had none. She said what she meant or expected in a few clear words that always made sense. Only secrecy about her family and her compulsion to say cunt were inexplicable at first, and from remarks she passed in the following two weeks I soon pieced together an explanation.

Her “people” (she never said father or mother) ran a residential hotel or nursing home for “people of our own sort”. They seemed a pernickety sort because “everything has to be just so.”

I asked what just so meant. She said, “Exactly right forever and ever world without end amen. Dinner was awful. We
had to dress.”

“In tuxedos and black ties?”

“Tuxedo is an American word. We British say evening dress. Female evening wear is less uniform than male attire but more taxing. Little hankies are an endless ordeal. I fidgeted with mine which is
not the done
thing,
in fact
utterly wrong,
in fact
a rotten
way to carry on
and I became quite impossible when I started (cunt) using (cunt) that word (cunt cunt).”

Tilda's use of that word had obviously been an unconscious but sensible device to escape from bullying relations. They had lodged her in a caravan park very far from them (“half a day's car ride away”) and made her promise not to mention their name because “if word gets around it will be bad for the business and we aren't exactly rolling in money.”

This made me think their business was a sanatorium for rich mental defectives whose guardians might have doubts about the establishment if they knew people on the staff had an eccentric daughter. I suspected too that Tilda's people were less posh than they wished. The few very posh people I have met care nothing for elaborate etiquette and swear like labourers.
But Tilda's family had given her worse eccentricities than that Anglo-Saxon word.

Next day I arose later than usual, made breakfast, gave Tilda hers on a tray in bed and got down to business. At ten she came into the workroom wearing my dressing gown and sat on the floor with her back to the wall, placidly watching figures and images I manipulated on the screen. Shortly after eleven she announced that she wanted a coffee. I said, “Good idea. Make me one too.”

She cried indignantly, “I can't do that! I don't know how!”

“I'll tell you how,” I said, treating the matter as a joke, “In the kitchen you will see an electric kettle on a board by the sink. Fill it with tap water and switch on the heat. There is also a jar of instant coffee powder on the board, a drawer of cutlery below, mugs hanging on hooks above. Take two mugs, put a small spoonful of powder in each, add boiling water and stir. Add milk and sugar to yours if you like, but I take my coffee black.”

She stamped out of the room and shortly returned with a mug she slammed down defiantly on my worktop. It contained
lukewarm water with brown grains floating on top. When I complained she said, “I
told
you I can't make coffee.”

I found that Tilda could wash and dress herself, eat and drink politely, talk clearly and truthfully and also (though I didn't know how she learned it) fuck with astonishing ease. Everything else had been done for her so she stubbornly refused to learn anything else.

Despite which our first weeks together were very happy. She added little to my housework. Former wives had insisted on making meals or being taken out for them. Tilda ate what I served without a word of complaint, nor did she litter the rooms with cosmetic tubes, powders, lotions, toilet tissues, fashion magazines and bags of shopping. She hated shopping and refused to handle money. I gathered that “her people” had never given her any, paying the caravan rent and Red Fox food bills by bank order. She brought to my house only the clothes she wore, clothes passed to her by someone of similar size, I think an older sister. By threatening to chuck her out unless she accompanied me and by ordering a taxi I
got her into the women's department of Marks and Spencer. Buying her clothes was not the slightly erotic adventure I had hoped as she cared nothing for what she wore and would have let me dress her like an outrageous prostitute had the garments been comfortable. But there is no fun in buying sexy clothes for folk who don't feel sexy, so I bought simple, conventional garments of the kind her sister had given, but more modern and in better-matching colours. I did not then notice that her attitude to clothes and making love were the same. She never restricted the pleasures I had with her in bed once or twice a night, so only later did I see she was indifferent to them.

Being together outside bed was also easy because we had no social life and did not want one. Since expulsion from her people's “rather grand place” her only society seemed to have been fellow diners in The Red Fox, and she would not have eloped with “that other man” if she had liked them much. My own social life once depended on friends met through my wives and a job in local housing, but during the last marriage I had become a
freelance working at home, which perhaps drove away wife number 3. Since then I had managed without friends, parties
et
cetera
. I like films and jazz I enjoyed in my teens. I play them on my computer and discuss them over the internet with fellow enthusiasts in England, Denmark and America so need no other society. An afternoon stroll in the park kept me fit. Tilda managed without even that. Apart from the Marks and Spencer's visit she has only left the flat once since entering it.

Our daily routine was this. After an early morning cuddle I rose, made breakfast, gave Tilda hers in bed, laid out her clothes for the day, put dirty clothes in the washing machine, started work. Tilda arose around ten, I made coffee for us at eleven thirty and a snack lunch at one. Then came my afternoon stroll and shopping expedition which she bitterly resented. I insisted on being away for at least ninety minutes but had to mark the exact minute of return on the clock face, and if I was a single minute late she got into a furious sulk. Then came a cup of tea and biscuit, then two or three hours of more programming, then I made the
evening meal, we consumed it, I did some housework, internetted for a little and so to bed. And wherever I was working Tilda sat on the floor, looking perfectly relaxed, sometimes frowning and pouting but often with a strange little satisfied smile. I assumed she was remembering the people and place she had escaped from. I once asked what she was thinking about and she murmured absent-mindedly, “Least said soonest mended. Curiosity killed the cat.”

I asked if she would like a television set? A Walkman radio? Magazines? She said, “A properly furnished mind cunt is its own feast cunt and does not need such expensive and foolish extravagancies.”

But she did not often use the cunt word now and when she saw an arresting image on my screen sometimes asked about it. I always answered fully and without technical jargon. Sometimes she heard me out and said “Right”, sometimes cut me short with a crisp “Enough said”, so I never knew how much she understood. When someone speaks with the accent and idiom of British cabinet ministers and bank managers and company directors it is hard not to suspect them of intelligence. I
sometimes think even now that Tilda might be trained to use a computer. Many undeveloped minds take to it easily, having nothing to unlearn.