Walking Wounded (14 page)

‘Michael and Lucy are going to my sister's,' she said.

Jane hurried home to hold on to her domesticity like a talisman.

During dinner they tried to find out who each other was. Her married name was Bland and when she mentioned ‘Harry' (which she did often enough for the word to be a conjunction, about as essential to her expression of herself as ‘and'), Eddie suspected that he had known her late husband. He didn't mention the fact. If he was right, his sense of Harry Bland hardly squared with Marion's hushed reverence. Entering the sanctum with hob-nailed boots was no part of seduction.

‘He was a salesman, too, you know,' Marion said.

‘Hm,' Eddie said.

She mentioned Jane Thomas's worries about what Marion might be getting herself into and waited. He dutifully explained about his separation and divorce, and how often he saw his daughters. He told her about the time he had worked in the bookshop and noticed her soften slightly, confronted with a man of some sensitivity, who had concerns beyond the material.

As the evening progressed, he noted a certain morbid tendency in her to refer to death. He forestalled it with levity. It was as if Harry's death had given her a Ph.D. in the subject. Once she mentioned the beatific expression on Harry's face as he stared towards the ceiling before he died. ‘He was probably thinking he'd never have to paint another cornice,' Eddie said to himself but not to her.

‘Have you ever watched anyone dying, Eddie?' she said.

‘I suppose I have.'

‘Have you really?'

‘You sound surprised.'

‘I wouldn't have guessed somehow.'

‘What it is,' he said, ‘I'm not wearing my death-watcher's badge tonight.'

Shared moments from the past made up much of the talk. They sat like lepidopterists comparing specimens. It was encouraging how well their memories matched. It was only occasionally that he had a Red Admiral and she had a moth. By the second bottle of wine, those fragile butterflies seemed to be shaking themselves free of their pins and fluttering in the room around them, there to be caught all over again. The air seemed full of possibilities.

‘Eddie,' she said. ‘You know that I can't take you home with me. It's been too long. I just can't.'

‘Of course not,' he said. ‘I understand.'

At her place they drank coffee. While their mouths discussed how soon he would have to leave, the physical sensations they had generated in each other circled their conversation like patient muggers, waiting for their moment. He precipitated the moment by getting up to leave. He crossed to the door.

‘Eddie,' she said. ‘Put out the light.'

He didn't question her. He put out the light. He stood in the darkness, listening to the sounds of her undressing beside the couch where he had left her. As if hypnotised by those sweet, furtive whisperings of cloth, he began to do the same. He started to feel his way towards her.

‘Please don't be rough, Eddie,' she said.

‘Darlin', I may never find you,' he said.

But he did and, by the unromantic light of an electric fire, her with one of her suspenders flapping loose, him with his socks still on, they made that mysterious and awesome transition from having sex to making love. Their bodies led them out past attitudes to wander looking for each other in an authentic darkness lust had made. His clever mouth went infant. Seduction was a second language he had never
effectively learned and he reverted to honest, desperate babbling and ate her as the uttermost expression of his meaning. In the heat Harry was incinerated. The past was cast like clothes and she became sheer, voracious present. They forged their bodies into weird shapes and cooled into strangers, not to each other, to themselves.

It was strange to sit holding each other and, watching the fire, wonder who you were.

Bed seemed a kind of solution. They talked gentle irrelevancies to each other and kissed and tried to sleep. But they couldn't sleep. How do you sleep when you're lying in a stranger's body? They got out of bed and tried to find roles to play.

Marion made more coffee. Eddie suggested fixing a screw to the handle of the door but Marion didn't know where there was a screwdriver. The jokes this led to between them were a relief. Finding themselves laughing, they both began to use jokes as a discreet conspiracy, dead leaves with which to smother the awkwardly living thing they had made between them.

Marion found an old photograph of them with Eddie striking a rather dramatic pose. They remembered the wincing pretentiousness of his teens. Marion went in search of a phrase he had been fond of using that would illustrate exactly how pretentious he had been. Eddie was trying to help her.

‘I've got it, I've got it,' she said.

‘Good,' Eddie said unconvincingly.

‘You said,' she said. ‘You said – wait for this. You were going to live life . . . It wasn't to the hilt. That's not what you said. Curmudgeon or something. Dudgeon. That was it. You were going to live life to the dudgeon. You said that. Whatever the hell it means.'

‘It means the same as hilt,' Eddie said. ‘I think I was trying to show I'd read
Macbeth
at school. “And on the blade
and dudgeon gouts of blood.” Jesus, that's embarrassing.'

‘Live life to the dudgeon. How about that? That's what you should call your memoirs. “How High Was My Dudgeon”!'

Eddie thought she was going to wet herself. He laughed loudly and waited. As they talked on, trying to exorcise the hours of darkness until normalcy could resume, both sensed how frenetic the conversation was becoming and how much closer to cruelty it was moving. But perhaps because of the guilt of what they were deliberately, if discreetly, doing or perhaps because daylight was coming near and there were still disturbing signs of life under the dead leaves, they made no attempt to stop themselves. They orchestrated a quarrel. It was as if they had tacitly agreed, ‘If the bloody thing won't lie still, let's use shovels.'

Harry provided the soil. Marion had found some photographs of him. She didn't just show them to Eddie. She kept setting them in gilt-frames of anecdote, touching them up into icons. She was re-instating Harry in his shrine and doing penance before it for her unworthiness, as exemplified, presumably, by what they had done tonight.

‘Selective embalming,' Eddie said.

Marion's smile became a wound.

‘Why do you say that? You don't know what a good person he was.'

‘If that's what bothers you, you can forget it. Because I knew him.'

‘You're lying. How could you be so sure?'

‘Harry Bland. Worked for Maynard's, didn't he? I thought I knew the name. And the photos clinched it.'

‘You're lying. You would've said before this.'

‘I don't like desecrating shrines.'

‘You seem to manage.'

‘I didn't know then that the deity was malign.'

‘Oh, you're lying.'

‘Maynard's. Area Supervisor. Right? I met him more
than once. Conferences. Once in London with people I knew. Not official biographer status, right enough. But enough to get a perspective. I always remember he had the top of a finger missing. How's that for a birthmark?'

‘That's right.'

Marion gathered all the photographs and replaced them in the shoe-box. She put the lid on very carefully, nursing the box on her lap.

‘If you knew him at all,' she said, ‘then you'll understand how lousy I feel in comparison.'

‘No.'

‘Then you didn't know him.'

‘I know that he chased tail. With what amounted to dedication. Not too successfully but keenly.'

‘Get to hell out of my flat!'

‘I'm not dressed for a dramatic exit.'

‘Just leave! Get out!'

‘Oh, piss off,' he said. ‘You're like a sparrow thinks its being victimised by winter. Nobody's after you. It's just if you talk you're liable to bump into the truth now and again. You better stop letting your thoughts run around in sentences. They'll get knocked down. And if you insist on clinching with people, naturally you'll burst your oxygen tent. And you'll have to breathe real air.'

‘What you're saying isn't the truth.'

‘Of course, it is.'

‘How do you know?'

‘Because I heard people who knew him well say it. Without malice. And I saw him trying to operate a couple of times.'

‘With women?'

‘It was all boringly heterosexual.'

‘You're a bastard!'

‘Accolades, accolades.'

‘I don't believe you.'

‘Then don't.'

They went on and Marion painstakingly outlined to Eddie just what an utterly pathetic object he was. He was, it seemed, a superannuated philanderer, a case of severely arrested development and someone who had – triumphant moment of finding the killing phrase – ‘acne of the eyes'. He infected whatever he looked at with his own disease.

Eddie constructed a rococo verbal edifice in his defence. The way he lived was, apparently, the nature of the game. You had to lose a lot of conventional attitudes trying to find that occasional chord which put the jangle of coincidence in tune. Private lives were getting slightly passé, anyway. They had the television for a mirror. Pretty soon they would all be able to copulate by post. It was old-fashioned of him to want to confront his privacy in a full-length, wasting mirror every so often. He made himself sound slightly heroic.

They went on, she in her dressing-gown and slippers, he in trousers and bare feet with his jacket over his naked body, his paunch protruding coyly. Coffee dregs congealed and were thawed out with fresh brewings. The cigarette-stubs sank in a sea of ash.

Among the sound of the first starlings, she said, ‘I believe you.'

‘Sorry?'

‘I believe you.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘About Harry. Damn you!'

‘As long as you don't damn him. He didn't ask to be canonised.'

‘I feel like not bothering to go on.'

‘No you don't. You've only lost something you never had. Nothing to be done about that.'

When it was fully light, he brought in the milk and made more coffee and toast. They breakfasted in silence. He dressed and came over to her. She stood up. They embraced and felt the earth move – not the world, just the rubbish they had heaped on that moment of disturbing love they
had experienced together. The feeling was still alive. They looked at each other.

‘Are you going to phone?' she asked.

He winked.

‘Maybe from Mars.'

She smiled.

‘I'll be out.'

He went back to the hotel and showered and shaved and put on fresh clothes. He saw two clients in the morning but his conversations with them were like transatlantic telephone calls. He was aware of a recurring gap between what they said and his assimilation of it. His eyes were sparking. He began to think that, functioning like this, he should be on commission from a rival firm.

He was back in the hotel by 12.30. He lunched in a dining-room where two women whispered among the empty tables and through the window two old men played the nine-hole putting-green in anoraks. The way their caps, unresisted by any hair, fitted themselves to their heads saddened him. They tottered about the grass like a vision of the future. He saw his life relentless as a corridor. From now on there wouldn't be many doors that opened off it.

Upstairs, he stripped to shirt, trousers and socks and lay on the bed. He didn't sleep. He regretted telling her about Harry. He didn't regret telling her about Harry. He regretted the way he had told her about Harry. He could be a cruel bastard.

He remembered Allison, his ex-wife – whom God preserve, but far from him – engaging in one of her scenes from the Theatre of the Absurd, during one of those dramatic quarrels that made Eugene O'Neill seem laconic. She had emerged from the bathroom to announce grandly that she had been trying to slit her wrists. He had made the mistake of rushing towards her to comfort her. A magnifying glass could have detected a red line across each wrist. His anger
at himself for falling for yet another of her fakeries had made him bitter.

‘You won't win any death-certificates with that,' he had said.

‘You'd think it was funny if I
was
dying,' she had said.

‘Considering the rate at which you're losing blood, you can't have more than twenty years. With a tourniquet you might stretch that to thirty. You should get an elastoplast. It's not very dramatic to die of septic wrists.'

He didn't like himself for having said that. He didn't like what he'd become. How long was it since he had thought of Margaret Sutton, who had loved him and who had killed herself? He was the one who as a teenager couldn't watch anybody cry without finding tears in his own eyes. He felt some of that softness re-activate as he thought of Marion. He wanted to protect her. Perhaps he wanted her to protect him, too. He wanted his head examined.

He thought of a joke card he had bought and put in the alcove in the sitting-room of his flat. It showed a tall, bare-breasted woman standing in the middle of a maze. A small, down-trodden man was standing outside the maze, looking at her and saying, ‘The last time I went into one of those it took me five years to get out.' The small man had been lucky.

My life is orderly, he told himself. So is a headstone, he told himself. You want to play that game again? he asked himself. You know another one that matters? he asked himself. At the moment Marion and he were two separate, contained confusions. Together, they could grow into a disaster. Neither of them needed that. But, beyond rationality, small images were budding in his memory, irrelevant as flowers. The softness of her upper arms. The way her head had found his neck before they parted.

He got up and walked about the room. ‘No way,' he said aloud. But it was years since he had felt so alive. He became idiot with anonymity in the hotel room. He whistled and
danced to himself in the mirror. He made pum-pum noises and snapped his fingers as he crossed the floor. He lay flat on the bed, reading the Tor Your Information' leaflet. Then he laid it on his face and carefully tested how hard he had to blow to blow it off. He noticed how squat his feet were in his socks. He found one tendril of dark cobweb dangling from the ceiling and for minutes watched it wafting gently.