The Light of Amsterdam (2 page)

So if his summons was about Jack it would be a wasted journey. He didn't have any answers except a vague and unconvincing reiteration that it was a phase he was going through, one of a million such adolescent journeys and which sooner or later he would come out of, and if not be his old self again exactly, then someone at least they could recognise and even have a conversation with, exchange pleasantries about the weather or plans for the weekend. He thought, too, of George's son confronted with all that outpouring of love for his father. How did that make him feel? It was not Susan's gift of guilt now he opened, which he knew was counterfeit and unfair, but his own which was more crushing because he believed it came stamped with the hallmark of truth. There was no outpouring of love for him, no public or personal achievement that a son might see and have it shape his view of his father. In stolid middle age and with a predictable and plodding job teaching in the city's art college, what fires might spark his son's evaluation of his father? What was there to admire or emulate, what shared language to speak? And why did he have this permanent feeling about his own life that he, too, was going through a phase, a phase that seemed to have no ending, but which in his imagination was the precursor to something better? Something, however, that recently seemed less and less likely to arrive.

He looked round his flat, the one-bedroomed hidey-hole he rented after his eviction from the family home and the half-hearted attempts to soften its bleakness only seemed to signal how far short they fell. So the black and white portrait of John Lee Hooker, the Dali poster of melting clocks and the three of his own abstract paintings – one of which had a damp patch in a corner, a consequence of Susan's banishment of them to the garage a decade earlier – seemed like futile gestures that only drew attention to the very condition they were supposed to remedy. He wondered what the most accurate description of his living quarters was – it wasn't a bachelor pad or an apartment, it wasn't a gentleman's residence or a den but just a tired space above a flower shop that existed on the edge of shabby. His eyes rested on the folded portable bed, the one he had bought for Jack in anticipation of when he would sleep over and which had been used twice. He had slept on it himself more and more, usually those times when his own bed seemed only to signal its emptiness and he needed the momentary comfort of a narrower, smaller place. It also helped sustain the illusion that where he found himself was a temporary setback, a brief diversion into a siding before he returned to the main line for the continuation of his journey to some better destination.

He knew that the future journey would not involve Susan and part of him believed that his infidelity was not entirely unwelcome to her as it provided the justification for his dismissal and was merely the event that galvanised her into an action that had been brooding in her mind for some time. He put the bullet in the gun and she fired it. And there was a new man on the scene to set the seal on the permanency of their separation. Bloody Gordon. He couldn't think of Gordon without prefacing the name with a term of abuse and although he was prepared to acknowledge that jealousy was the spark that initially fired his judgement, it had burned more intensely and purely the more he got to know him. Gordon the small-time builder of extensions and roof-space conversions, Gordon with his suntanned muscular arms who couldn't wear any kind of shirt unless it had an alligator or a polo player on his left tit. It was as if Susan was kicking sand in the face of how he liked to see himself and had taken a wild swing on a vine through the jungle and thrown herself into the arms of someone who didn't do art, or read books, and who permanently had a copy of the
Sun
folded on the dashboard of his white van above the steering wheel like a proud proletarian flag. Gordon who listened to
AC
/
DC
and Metallica and was five years younger than Susan. Gordon who was good with his hands – why didn't she just come right out and say that he was red-hot in bed and in comparison made him look like an undersexed wimp? The solace he tried to take in his intellectual superiority was thinning in spiteful synchronicity with the thinning of his hair and if at the back it still rested at an artful and slightly rebellious length below his collar, there was a melting polar cap at his crown that he monitored in the mirror on a weekly basis. In spiteful contrast Gordon sprouted hair from every possible part of his body: he had a Michael Heseltine hairline that started low on his head and swept back like the thickest of hedges where all sorts of wildlife – foxes, rabbits, birds' nests – could hide undetected. It fell out from his always open shirt like tumbleweed in an abandoned Wild West town; it swathed his forearms. He remembered the story of Jacob who deceived his blind father by covering his arms with animal skins to get the blessing and started to think that the hirsute Gordon had stolen his.

He wondered what their daughter Caroline thought of him. Away at university in Scotland she had less time to form any strong opinion but he fervently hoped she disliked his replacement before telling himself that he was being selfish, that if he had been so committed to happy families he wouldn't have strayed one night in October when false faces and municipal firework displays were the order of the day and somehow, and for reasons he didn't fully understand, he had succumbed to temptation, only to find that what held the tantalising prospect of passionate excitement fizzled out almost instantaneously like a damp squib. A Master's student he was supervising. A mature student thankfully. A ceramicist. He had felt it coming for weeks – the needing advice, the enjoyment of his praise, the way that being together subtly left him feeling slightly different, in some vague but pleasant realignment. So maybe it wasn't about future possibilities so much as nostalgia, a rediscovering of what had been lost. Late at night in the studio. She was rolling clay, slapping and stretching it with an honest vigour and a simple determination that made him stretch out his hand and touch her hair. That's all he did, all he would have done, except she was in his arms and kissing him with an urgency that took his breath away and before any part of his brain could engage with the moment she was pulling him backwards on top of the table, on top of the clay. Afterwards – one of several embarrassments created – there was a pressed print of the moment. But a print of what? Passion? Loneliness? Stupidity? He still didn't know and it was followed by nothing else. Nothing was ever fired or formed beyond that brief, breathless encounter where two strangers stumbled against each other. Afterwards he did what he thought was the gentlemanly thing and inflated her marks and they parted wishing each other well with an unspoken understanding that they would never see each other or mention this thing ever again. Ships in the night they sailed steadily on.

So why then had he felt the necessity of telling Susan? Why in hell did he tell her? Well, of course, there was the usual tongue-loosening prompting of shame – the hair trigger of guilt – but also, if he was entirely truthful, a self-destructive desire to suggest that he was still someone that someone else could want, in a way she no longer did. None of it mattered really because before he had finished his genuine expression of abject remorse and appeal for forgiveness, she had dismissed all such present or future pleas and sent their marriage to Death Row.

He made himself a cup of tea and let the record finish, complete with its occasional crackle and one large jump, before driving over to the house that he still thought of as his home. But at the front door he rang the bell and waited, the obligatory humiliation that attended every visit and marked him as a temporary visitor, a guest whose welcome or unwelcome status was linked entirely to the reason for his arrival. And he couldn't just call in on a whim or to collect something – everything had to be prearranged. He couldn't even be a father except by appointment. Only the absence of Gordon's van lightened the moment as he waited for admission through the door that he had personally painted a very beautiful vermilion but which she had dismissed as pillar-box red.

‘Thanks for coming,' she said, opening the door and then walking back down the hall, leaving him to follow. She had pulled her hair back tightly in a ponytail and she hadn't got her face on. Perhaps he imagined it but she seemed to have lost a little weight. There was the smell of soup cooking. Homemade soup – already he felt vulnerable. Lentil soup no doubt, thick with chicken or bacon, and served with baguette and proper butter. If it was a softener, a bribe for what she needed him to do, she was already halfway home. She still hadn't faced him and was stirring the soup, adding a little black pepper with an elegant shimmy of her fingers.

‘Did you watch the funeral on television?' he asked in an attempt to make conversation, an act that still felt shockingly strange after the intimacy of twenty-two years of marriage.

‘No, I've been busy. Sorting stuff out.'

She didn't elucidate about what stuff had preoccupied her and as she hadn't watched the funeral there wasn't an obvious topic to talk about. He wasn't going to tell her that he was one of those attending because he knew she would take it as further evidence of his supposed mid-life crisis and collapse into a dangerous and unpredictable state of emotional chaos.

‘How's Jack?'

‘Who knows?' she said, turning to look at him for the first time. ‘You need a haircut,' she added in a low voice as she inspected him and then, perhaps remembering that she no longer had proprietorial rights, stirred the soup again. ‘He's in his room. Appeared for breakfast about an hour ago. Then disappeared.'

‘And how are things?'

‘With Jack? Just the same. Who knows? He hasn't said half a dozen words in a week.'

‘Is he still going out with Jasmine?'

‘Think so. She was here last weekend.'

‘That has to be good for him?'

‘How do you work that one out? The girl never speaks either and she's dyed her hair jet black with purple streaks. She's wearing it over one eye like a patch. Gordon thinks she's a Goth but when I asked Jack he nearly did his nut as if I'd insulted her.'

It pleased him to hear that Gordon had got something wrong even though he knew it was irredeemably childish. ‘So is it Jack you wanted to see me about?' he asked, but she looked at him as if he hadn't been listening and already the tone of her voice suggested that whatever he had to say would at best be wrong and at worst an insult in its unfathomable depths of stupidity.

‘It's not all about Jack and I'm tired living my life worrying about my children. If I'd known there was this much worry I swear to God I wouldn't have had them.'

‘Is it Caroline? Has something happened to her?' Already his mind was frantically freefalling through the nightmares of pregnancy, date rape, examination failure.

‘No, it's not about Caroline. Alan, just for once this is not about our children. Why can't it be about me? I'm a person, too. And right now I don't feel great.'

She stirred hell out of the soup and he knew, he just knew, it was cancer. He held the edge of the table with both hands as if standing in the dock, because he was guilty, he was the one who'd brought it on, and all their friends and their two children would blame him and hate him for ever. One crazy, selfish act had released the spores that had infected her and there was no way back. And he'd just asked her if she'd seen the funeral!

‘I'm going away, Alan,' she said, turning to look at him again, her face steamed and shiny.

He staggered to his feet. ‘Susan! Susan! When?'

‘Next weekend.'

‘Next weekend?' God, she must have kept it a secret for a long time. Or else it must have advanced very quickly.

‘There's an easyJet flight. Back late on Sunday. It's only a two-and-a-half-hour flight.'

They were sending her abroad for treatment. And a bloody easyJet flight. Cut-price cancer care, low-cost lymphoma. He would write to the newspapers. He would go to Stormont, confront the minister at his desk.

‘I'll come with you.'

‘Alan, what are you talking about?'

‘I'll come with you – you can't do this on your own,' he insisted. ‘It's only right.'

‘Alan, what are you on about? Have you been out on the town last night? Gordon's coming of course. He's part of this.'

He fell back in the chair. He was to be replaced by Gordon right to the end and he winced at the sharpness of that hurt.

‘Why didn't you tell me before?' he asked, conscious that his sense of grievance was insensitive and unreasonable but unable to shake off the unfairness that one poor press into clay was going to blank out over twenty years of marriage, every one of those years crammed full of a shared intensity of life that still felt real and not just yellowing pages pasted in some scrapbook.

‘We've been thinking of it for a while now but it's a big decision and I need to talk to you about it. It'll involve selling the house.'

She was going to marry Gordon. Her final throw of the dice. There wasn't any time now for holding back so he said, ‘You're going to marry Gordon?' trying to stop incredulity seeping into his voice.

Setting the wooden spoon on a saucer she came and sat at the table, staring again as if inspecting him. ‘Alan, is there something wrong with you? You're not listening. I'm trying to tell you something and you're not listening so if you could just be patient and take this in I'd be very grateful.'