Collected Stories (68 page)

‘If you or one of the children fell sick, Alexandra …’ he put to her one night.

It was dark, but he had switched on the garden lights. They were sitting out, eating their favourite ice-cream and drinking champagne. His trees shaded the house; the two young labradors, one black, one white, sat at their feet. He could see his wood in the distance, carpeted with bluebells in the spring, and the treehouse he would restore for his grandchildren. The pond, stifled by duck weed, had to be cleaned. He was saving up for a tennis court.

This was what he had lived for and made with his labour. He wasn’t old and he wasn’t young, but at the age when he was curious about, and could see, the shape of his whole life, his beginning and his end.

‘You’d go to a doctor, wouldn’t you? Not to a faith healer.’

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘First to a doctor.’

‘Then?’

‘And then, perhaps to a therapist.’

‘A therapist? For what?’

‘To grasp the logic –’

‘What logic?’

‘The inner logic … of the illness.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I am one person,’ she said. ‘A whole.’

‘And you are in control?’

‘Something in me is making my life – my relationships, I mean – the way they are, yes.’

He was opposed to this, but he didn’t know what to say.

She went on, ‘There are archaic unknown sources which I want to locate.’ Then she quoted her therapist, knowing that at university he had studied the history of ideas. ‘If Whitehead said that all philosophy is footnotes to Plato, Freud taught us that maturity is merely a footnote to childhood.’

He said, ‘If it’s all been decided years ago, if there’s no free will but only the determinism of childhood, then it’s pointless to think we can make any difference.’

‘Freedom is possible.’

‘How?’

‘The freedom that comes from understanding.’

He was thinking about this.

*

His car had left the narrow suburban streets for bigger roads. Suddenly, he was in a maze of new one-way systems bounded by glittering office blocks. He drove through the same deep highway several times, to the same accompaniments from Mother.

Setting off from home that morning, he had been convinced that he knew how to get to the cemetery, but now, although he recognised some things, it was only a glancing, bewildered familiarity. He hadn’t driven around this area for more than twenty-five years.

Mother seemed to take it for granted that he knew where he was. This might have been the only confidence she had in him. She loved ‘safe’ drivers. She liked coaches; for some reason, coach drivers, like some doctors, were trustworthy. Being safe mattered more than anything else because, in an inhospitable world, they were always in danger.

He didn’t want to stop to ask the way, and he couldn’t ask Mother for fear his uncertainty would turn her more feverish.

Cars driven by tattooed south London semi-criminals with shaven heads seemed to be pursuing them; vans flew at them from unexpected angles. His feet were cold, but his hands were sweating.

If he didn’t keep himself together, he would turn into her.

*

He hadn’t spoken to Mother for almost three months. He had had an argument with his brother – there had almost been a fist fight in the little house – and Mother, instead of making the authoritative intervention he had wished for, had collapsed weeping.

‘I want to die,’ she’d wailed. ‘I’m ready!’

The forced pain she gave off had made him throw up in the gutter outside the house.

He had looked up from his sick to see the faces of the neighbours at their windows – the same neighbours, now thirty years older, he’d known as a child.

They would have heard from Mother that he was well paid.

Sometimes he was proud of his success. He had earned the things that other people wanted.

He worked in television news. He helped decide what the news was. Millions watched it. Many people believed that the news was the most important thing that had happened in the world that day. To be connected, they needed the news in the way they needed bread and water.

He remembered how smug he had been, self-righteous even, as a young man at university. Some went to radical politics or Mexico; others sought a creative life. The women became intense, quirkily intelligent and self-obsessed. Being lower middle class, he worked hard, preparing his way. The alternative, for him, he knew, was relative poverty and boredom. He had learned how to do his job well; for years he had earned a good salary. He had shut his mouth and pleased the bosses. He had become a boss himself; people were afraid of him, and tried to guess what he was thinking.

He worried there was nothing to him, that under his thinning hair he was a ‘hollow man’, a phrase from the poetry he’d studied at school. Being ‘found out’, Gerald called it, laughing, like someone who had perpetrated a con.

Harry’s daughter Heather talked of wanting confidence. He understood that. But where could confidence originate, except from a parent who believed in you?

There she was next to him, vertiginous, drivelling, scratching in fear at the seat she sat on, waving, in her other hand, the disconnected seat-belt buckle.

*

It wasn’t long before Alexandra started to call it ‘work’.

The ‘work’ she was doing on herself.

The ‘work’ with the different-coloured pens.

The ‘work’ of throwing them on the floor, of being the sort of person who threw things about if she felt like it.

‘Work,’ he said, with a slight sneer. ‘The “work” of imagining an apple and talking to it.’

‘The most important work I’ve done.’

‘It won’t pay for the barn to be cleared and rebuilt.’

‘Why does that bother you so much?’

Money was a way of measuring good things. The worth of a man had to be related to what he was able to earn. She would never be convinced by this.

Her ‘work’ was equivalent to his work. No; it was more important. She had started to say his work was out of date, like prisons, schools, banks and politics.

She said, ‘The cost and waste of transporting thousands of people from one part of the country to another for a few hours. These things continue because they have always happened, like bad habits. These are nineteenth-century institutions and we are a few months from the end of the twentieth century. People haven’t yet found more creative ways of doing things.’

He thought of the trains on the bridges over the Thames, transporting trainloads of slaves to futility.

*

In the suburbs, where Mother still lived, the idea was to think of nothing; to puzzle over your own experience was to gratuitously unsettle yourself. How you felt wasn’t important, only what you did, and what others saw.

Yet he knew that if he wasn’t looking at himself directly, he was looking at himself in the world. The world had his face in it! If you weren’t present to yourself, you’d find yourself elsewhere!

Almost all the men in the street had lighted sheds at the end of the garden, or on their allotments, to which they retreated in the evenings. These men were too careful for the pub. The sheds were where the men went to get away from the women. The women who weren’t employed and had the time, therefore, to be disturbed. It was a division of labour: they carried the madness for the men.

*

‘All right, Mother?’ he said at last. ‘We aren’t doing so badly now.’

They had escaped the highway and regained the narrow, clogged suburban roads.

‘Not too bad, dear,’ she sighed, passing the back of her hand across her forehead. ‘Oh, watch out! Can’t you look where you’re going? There’s traffic everywhere!’

‘That means we go slower.’

‘They’re so near!’

‘Mother, everyone has an interest in not getting killed.’

‘That’s what you think!’

If Mother had kept on repeating the same thing and squealing at high volume, he would have lost his temper; he would have turned the car round, taken her home and dumped her. That would have suited him. Alexandra was coming back tomorrow; he had plenty to do.

But after a few minutes Mother calmed down, and even gave him directions.

They were on their way to the cemetery.

*

It was easy to be snobbish and uncharitable about the suburbs, but what he saw around him was ugly, dull and depressing. He had, at least, got away.

But, like Mother continuing to live here when there was no reason for it, he had put up with things unnecessarily. He had never rebelled, least of all against himself. He had striven, up to a point – before the universe, like his mother, had shut like a door in his face.

*

He was afraid Alexandra would fall in love with some exotic idea, or with Thailand, and never want to return. Mother’s irritability and indifference had taught him that women wanted to escape. If they couldn’t get away, they hated you for making them stay.

*

There was a couple he and Alexandra had known for a long time. The woman had laboured for years to make their house perfect. One afternoon, as he often did, Harry drove over for tea in their garden. The woman cultivated wild flowers; there was a summerhouse.

Harry sighed, and said to the man, ‘You have everything you could want here. If I were you, I’d never go out.’

‘I don’t,’ the man replied. He added casually, ‘If I had my way, of course, we wouldn’t live here but in France. They have a much higher standard of living.’

The man did not notice, but at this the woman crumpled, as if she’d been shot. She went inside, shut the windows and became ill. She could not satisfy her husband, couldn’t quell his yearnings. It was impossible, and, without him asking her to do it, she had worn herself out trying.

If Alexandra was seeking cures, it was because she didn’t have everything and he had failed her.

Yet their conflicts, of which there was at least one a week – some continued for days – weren’t entirely terrible. Their disagreements uncovered misunderstandings. Sometimes they wanted different things, but only in the context of each other. She was close to his wishes, to the inner stream of him. They always returned to each other. There was never a permanent withdrawal, as there had been with Mother.

It was a little paradise at times.

*

In the newspapers, he learned of actors and sportsmen having affairs. Women wanted these people. It seemed easy.

There were attractive women in the office, but they were claimed immediately. They didn’t want him. It wasn’t only that he looked older than his years, as his wife had informed him. He looked unhealthy.

Plastic, anonymous, idealised sex was everywhere; the participants were only young and beautiful, as if desire was the exclusive domain of the thin.

He didn’t think it was sex he wanted. He liked to believe he could get by without excessive pleasure, just as he could get by without drugs. He kept thinking that the uses of sex in the modern world were a distraction. It didn’t seem to be the important thing.

What was important? He knew what it was – impermanence, decay, death and the way it informed the present – but couldn’t bring himself to look straight at it.

*

‘Where is Alexandra today?’ Mother asked. ‘I thought she might come with us. She never wants to see me.’

Mother’s ‘madness’ had no magnetism for Alexandra; her complaints bored her; Alexandra had never needed her.

He said, ‘She’s gone to Thailand. But she sends beautiful letters to me, by fax, every day.’

He explained that Alexandra had gone to a centre in Thailand for a fortnight to take various courses. There were dream, healing, and ‘imaging’ workshops.

Mother said, ‘What is she doing there?’

‘She said on the phone that she is with other middle-aged women in sandals and bright dresses with a penchant for Joni Mitchell. The last I heard she was hugging these women and taking part in rituals on the beach.’

‘Rituals?’

He had said to Alexandra when she rang, ‘But you can’t dance, Alexandra. You hate it.’

‘I can dance badly,’ she’d replied. ‘And that’s what I do, night after night.’

Dancing badly.

Harry said to Mother, ‘She told me she looked up and the moon was smiling.’

‘At her in particular?’ said Mother.

‘She didn’t itemise,’ said Harry.

‘This is at your expense?’

Alexandra, somewhat patronisingly, had felt she had to explain it wasn’t an infidelity.

‘There’s no other man involved,’ she’d said before she left, packing a few things into their son’s rucksack. ‘I hope there aren’t even any men there.’

He had looked at her clothes.

‘Is that all you’re taking?’

‘I will rely on the kindness of strangers,’ she had replied.

‘You’ll be wearing their clothes?’

‘I don’t see why not.’

It was an infidelity if she was ‘coming alive’, as she had put it. What could be a more disturbing betrayal than ‘more life’ even as he felt himself to be fading!

He was a conventional man, and he lived a conventional life in order for her, and the children presumably, one day, to live unconventional ones. Was he, to her, a dead weight? He feared losing sight of her, as she accelerated, dancing, into the distance.

‘Anyway,’ Mother said, ‘thank you, Harry, dear.’

‘For what?’

‘For taking me to Dad’s … Dad’s …’

He knew she couldn’t say ‘grave’.

‘That’s okay.’

‘The other sons are good to their mothers.’

‘Better than me?’

‘Some of them visit their mums every week. They sit with them for hours, playing board games. One boy sent her on a cruise.’

‘On the
Titanic
?’

‘Little beast, you are! Still, without you I’d have to take three buses to see Dad.’

‘Shame you didn’t learn to drive.’

‘I wish I had.’

He was surprised. ‘Do you really?’

‘Then I would have got around.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘Oh, I don’t know now. Too much to do, with the washing and the cleaning.’