Collected Stories (45 page)

She said, ‘I came back from the pub and turned on the TV last week, and there you were, criticising some clever book or other. I didn’t understand it.’

‘Right.’

He had always been polite to her, even when he had been unable to wake her up because she had been drinking the previous night. She had seen him unshaven, and in his pyjamas at four in the morning; she had opened doors and found him and his wife abusing one another behind them; she had been at their rented villa in Assisi when his wife tore the cloth from the table with four bowls of pasta on it. She must have heard energetic reconciliations.

‘I hope it goes well,’ she said.

‘Thank you.’

The boys ordered big doughnuts and juice. The juice spilled over the table and the doughnuts were smeared round their mouths. Roger had to hold his cappuccino out in front of him to stop the boys sticking their grimy fingers in the froth and sucking the chocolate from them. To his relief they joined Lindy’s child.

Roger began a conversation with a woman at the next table who had complimented him on his sons. She told him she wanted to write a newspaper article on how difficult some people found it to say ‘No’ to children. You could not charm them, she maintained, as you could people at a cocktail party; they had to know what the limits were. He did not like the idea that she had turned disciplining her child into a manifesto, but he would ask for her phone number before he left. For more than a year he had not gone out socially, fearing that people would see his anguish.

He was extracting his notebook and pen when Lindy called him. He turned round. His sons were at the far end of the teahouse, rolling on top of another, larger, boy, who was wailing, ‘He’s biting me!’

Eddie did bite; he kicked too.

‘Boys!’ Roger called.

He hurried them into their coats again, whispering furiously for them to shut up. He said goodbye to the woman without getting her phone number. He did not want to appear lecherous.

He had always been proud of the idea that he was a good man who treated people fairly. He did not want to impose himself. The world would be a better place if people considered their actions. Perhaps he had put himself on a pedestal. ‘You have a high reputation – with yourself!’ a friend had said. Everyone was entitled to some pride and vanity. However, this whole business with his wife had stripped him of his moral certainties. There was no just or objective way to resolve competing claims: those of freedom – his freedom – to live and develop as he liked, against the right of his family to have his dependable presence. But no amount of conscience or morality would make him go back. He had not missed his wife for a moment.

As they were leaving the park, Eddie tore some daffodils from a flowerbed and stuffed them in his pocket. ‘For Mummy,’ he explained.

The house was a ten-minute walk away. Holding hands, they ran home through the rain. His wife would be back soon, and he would be off.

It was not until he had taken out his key that he remembered his wife had changed the lock last week. What she had done was illegal: he owned the house; but he had laughed at the idea she thought he would intrude, when he wanted to be as far away as possible.

He told the boys they would have to wait. They sheltered in the little porch where water dripped on their heads. The boys soon tired of standing with him and refused to sing the songs he started. They pulled their hoods down and chased one another up and down the path.

It was dark. People were coming home from work.

The next-door neighbour passed by. ‘Locked out?’ he said.

‘’Fraid so.’

Oliver said, ‘Daddy, why can’t we go in and watch the cartoons?’

‘It’s only me she’s locked out,’ he said. ‘Not you. But you are, of course, with me.’

‘Why has she locked us out?’

‘Why don’t you ask her?’ he said.

His wife confused and frightened him. But he would greet her civilly, send the children into the house and say goodbye. It was, however, difficult to get cabs in the area; impossible at this time and in this weather. It was a twenty-minute walk to the tube station, across a dripping park where alcoholics and junkies gathered under the trees. His shoes, already wet, would be filthy. At the party he would have to try and remove the worst of the mud in the toilet.

After the violence of separation he had expected a diminishment of interest and of loathing, on her part. He himself had survived the worst of it and anticipated a quietness. Kind indifference had come to seem an important blessing. But as well as refusing to divorce him, she sent him lawyers’ letters about the most trivial matters. One letter, he recalled, was entirely about a cheese sandwich he had made for himself when visiting the children. He was ordered to bring his own food in future. He thought of his wife years ago, laughing and putting out her tongue with his semen on it.

‘Hey there,’ she said, coming up the path.

‘Mummy!’ they called.

‘Look at them,’ he said. ‘They’re soaked through.’

‘Oh dear.’

She unlocked the door and the children ran into the hall. She nodded at him. ‘You’re going out.’

‘Sorry?’

‘You’ve got a suit on.’

He stepped into the hall. ‘Yes. A little party.’

He glanced into his former study, where his books were packed in boxes on the floor. He had, as yet, nowhere to take them. Beside them were a pair of men’s black shoes he had not seen before.

She said to the children, ‘I’ll get your tea.’ To him she said, ‘You haven’t given them anything to eat, have you?’

‘Doughnuts,’ said Eddie. ‘I had chocolate.’

‘I had jam,’ said Oliver.

She said, ‘You let them eat that rubbish?’

Eddie pushed the crushed flowers at her. ‘There you are, Mummy.’

‘You must not take flowers from the park,’ she said. ‘They are for everyone.’

‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ said Eddie suddenly, with his hand over his mouth.

‘Shut up! People don’t like it!’ said Oliver, and hit Eddie, who started to cry.

‘Listen to him,’ she said to Roger. ‘You’ve taught them to use filthy language. You are really hopeless.’

‘So are you,’ he said.

In the past few months, preparing his lectures, he had visited some disorderly and murderous places. The hatred he witnessed puzzled him still. It was atavistic but abstract; mostly the people did not know one another. It had made him aware of how people clung to their antipathies, and used them to maintain an important distance, but in the end he failed to understand why this was. After all the political analysis and talk of rights, he had concluded that people had to grasp the necessity of loving one another; and if that was too much, they had to let one another alone. When this still seemed inadequate and banal, he suspected he was on the wrong path, that he was trying to say something about his own difficulties in the guise of intellectual discourse. Why could he not find a more direct method? He had, in fact, considered writing a novel. He had plenty to say, but could not afford the time, unpaid.

He looked out at the street. ‘It’s raining quite hard.’

‘It’s not too bad now.’

He said, ‘You haven’t got an umbrella, have you?’

‘An umbrella?’

He was becoming impatient. ‘Yes. An umbrella. You know, you hold it over your head.’

She sighed and went back into the house. He presumed she was opening the door to the airing cupboard in the bathroom.

He was standing in the porch, ready to go. She returned empty-handed.

‘No. No umbrella,’ she said.

He said, ‘There were three there last week.’

‘Maybe there were.’

‘Are there not still three umbrellas there?’

‘Maybe there are,’ she said.

‘Give me one.’

‘No.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I’m not giving you one,’ she said. ‘If there were a thousand umbrellas there I would not give you one.’

He had noticed how persistent his children were; they asked, pleaded, threatened and screamed, until he yielded.

He said, ‘They are my umbrellas.’

‘No,’ she repeated.

‘How petty you’ve become.’

‘Didn’t I give you everything?’

He cleared his throat. ‘Everything but love.’

‘I did give you that, actually.’ She said, ‘I’ve rung my friend. He’s on his way.’

He said, ‘I don’t care. Just give me an umbrella.’

She shook her head. She went to shut the door. He put his foot out and she banged the door against his leg. He wanted to rub his shin but could not give her the pleasure.

He said, ‘Let’s try and be rational.’

He had hated before, his parents and brother, at certain times. But it was a fury, not a deep, intellectual and emotional hatred like this. He had had psychotherapy; he took tranquillisers, but still he wanted to pulverise his wife. None of the ideas he had about life would make this feeling go away.

‘You used to find the rain “refreshing”,’ she sneered.

‘It has come to this,’ he said.

‘Here we are then,’ she said. ‘Don’t start crying about it.’

He pushed the door. ‘I’ll get the umbrella.’

She pushed the door back at him. ‘You cannot come in.’

‘It is my house.’

‘Not without prior arrangement.’

‘We arranged it,’ he said.

‘The arrangement’s off.’

He pushed her.

‘Are you assaulting me?’ she said.

He looked outside. An alcoholic woman he had had to remove from the front step on several occasions was standing at the end of the path holding a can of lager.

‘I’m watching you,’ she shouted. ‘If you touch her you are reported!’

‘Watch on!’ he shouted back.

He pushed into the house. He placed his hand on his wife’s chest and forced her against the wall. She cried out. She did bang her head, but it was, in football jargon, a ‘dive’. The children ran at his legs. He pushed them away.

He went to the airing cupboard, seized an umbrella and made his way to the front door.

As he passed her she snatched it. Her strength surprised him, but he yanked the umbrella back and went to move away. She raised her hand. He thought she would slap him. It would be the first time. But she made a fist. As she punched him in the face she continued to look at him.

He had not been hit since he left school. He had forgotten the physical shock and then the disbelief, the shattering of the feeling that the world was a safe place.

The boys were screaming. Roger had dropped the umbrella. His mouth throbbed; his lip was bleeding. He must have staggered and lost his balance for she was able to push him outside.

He heard the door slam behind him. He could hear the children crying. He walked away, past the alcoholic woman still standing at the end of the path. He turned to look at the lighted house. When they had calmed down, the children would have their bath and get ready for bed. They liked being read to. It was a part of the day he had always enjoyed.

He turned his collar up but knew he would get soaked. He wiped his mouth with his hand. She had landed him quite a hit. He would not be able to find out until later whether it would show. If it did, it would cause interest and amusement at the party, but not to him; not with a date to go to.

He stood in a doorway watching the people hurry past. His trouser legs stuck to his skin. It would not stop raining for a long time. He could not just stand in the same place for hours. The thing to do was not to mind. He started out then, across the Green, in the dark, wet through, but moving forward.

It had been snowing.

He got to the house, looked at his watch, saw he was late, and hurried on to a pub he knew at the end of the street. He pushed the door and a barking Alsatian on a chain leapt at him. Young children, one of them badly bruised, chased one another across the slush-wet floor, tripping over the adults’ feet. The jukebox was loud, as were the TV and the drinkers’ voices. He hadn’t been in here for months yet he recognised the same people.

He was backing out when the barman shouted, ‘Hey, my man Alan. Alan, where you been?’ and started to pull him a pint.

Alan took a seat at the bar, lit a cigarette and drank off half his glass. If he finished quickly he might get another pint in him. It would mean he had no money but why would he need money tonight? The last time he had attended a school nativity play and carol service he had been fourteen, and his best friend’s father had turned up so soaked in alcohol that he didn’t realise his tie had been dunked in red wine and was still dripping. The boys pointed and laughed at him, and his son had been ashamed.

Alan nodded at the barman who placed the second pint beside the first. Alan’s son was too young for shame; in fact, Mikey was starting to worship his father.

Alan needed to calm himself. Melanie, his present girlfriend, with whom he’d lived for a year, had pursued him down the street as he’d left the flat, pulling on his hand and begging him not to go. He told her repeatedly that he had promised his son that he would attend the nativity play. ‘All the daddies will be there,’ Mikey had said.

‘And so will this daddy,’ Alan had said.