Collected Stories (81 page)

I watch the madman passing, and then I look at her again, the woman whose eyes have not left my face. A terrible thought occurs to me, not one I could bear to say to anyone. I know why her son has withdrawn inside himself, and why he cannot speak, if this is what she does to him. She has forced him into a compact ball, the only protection he has. But who will say this to her?

She is looking at her watch. She must have measured out exactly how much time she had to talk. ‘That’s it,’ she says. ‘Sorry, I don’t want to be late. We got distracted. Lovely to see you. Let’s do it again.’

I get out of the car and take a few steps. I am weak; I need to lie down.

The woman waves and drives off, leaving me on the pavement in the rain with a madman striding towards me.

It was late morning when the door bell rang. Max was tramping on an exercise bicycle in his new gym, flicking idly between Indian, Chinese and Arab TV channels. As he did with everything now – recently he had begun to practise, actively, a new creed of ‘slowness’ – he took his time showering and dressing. Then he sat on the bed, staring out of the window, considering scenes from the past. There was no rush: Marta, the new girl, would let Maggie in, and provide her with coffee, biscuits and the newspapers.

About three times a year Maggie came to London to stay with friends for a few days. Informing Max that she needed to see him, she added that their usual lunch, welcome though it was, wouldn’t be enough. She had a serious request she couldn’t talk about on the phone.

He and Maggie had met at a campus university in the mid-seventies and stayed together for around ten years, depending on how it was added up, or by whom. It had been his longest relationship, apart from that with his wife. But there were other reasons he wanted to think about what he now called the ‘experiment’. After it, Maggie had moved to the country with her partner Joe – called Jesus the Carpenter by Max – and brought up two children. Max had remained in the city, taking advantage of the Thatcherite expansion of the media, where he became successful and now had four children.

‘Hello, my dear,’ Max said, when he appeared in the kitchen in shorts, flip-flops and a T-shirt which he now realised only just covered his stomach when he stood up. ‘Let’s go onto the terrace. I’d like you to see it.’

It was unusual now for him to invite Maggie to the house because she irritated Max’s wife with, as Lucy put it, her ‘soppy self-righteousness and earnestness’. Lucy might well go on to say more maddening things like, ‘And as for that weird thing the three of you seemed to have had together, can you explain what in God’s name that was about?’

What indeed? However, Lucy was away filming; Max, she and the rest of the family would meet up tomorrow at the place they’d bought in Suffolk.

Max led Maggie up the stairs and onto the terrace, which stretched out across the top of the kitchen. There was a view of the garden, with a shed at the end, where the boys rehearsed their band and watched movies with their friends. Beyond that was the bowling green and the local park. It was spring, the blossom was out; so far it was the nicest day of the year.

They sat at the table and Marta, a young woman with dyed red hair, appeared again with a tray on which there was coffee and two glasses of grappa.

He said, ‘This is where I’m intending to spend the summer months.’

Maggie put her head back, attempting to catch the sun on her face. ‘What doing?’

‘Writing poetry, drawing, learning to paint. Yes,’ he said, ‘I’ve got nothing better to do. But for years I was too tangled up to be creative.’

‘You were? How?’

He indicated the house and terrace. ‘It’s all nearly finished. I did it myself.’

‘The building?’

‘Of course not. The organisation of it.’

‘You seem to have a horde of people working here.’

‘It takes two girls to keep the house and kids in order, and the Polish builders are installing a sauna.’

‘Where are those naughty boys?’

He had briefly seen two of his sons – aged fourteen and fifteen – that morning in the kitchen with a bunch of their friends, who’d slept over.

‘The younger ones are with their grandparents, and the big ones seem to have disappeared to Niketown to spend my money,’ he said. ‘They’ll be back later. We’re going up the road to watch Chelsea at home tonight.’

Maggie asked, ‘Why? Are you a Chelsea supporter?’

He hummed a Chelsea song. ‘We all are. Season ticket.’

‘But you used to be Fulham.’

‘I was Fulham, sort of,’ he admitted. ‘Mainly because of what I read about Johnny Haynes as a kid.’

He had intended to ask Maggie how she was, knowing she would complain about the hours, the wages, the clients, the government and the local council. She’d been a social worker since they’d been together, when he was beginning to make documentaries, and her work was demanding and difficult. He’d always said that she didn’t appear to be quite cut out for it, becoming over-involved and allowing it to exhaust and infuriate her, but she called it ‘passion’.

He just said, ‘What was it you wanted to ask me?’

‘Max, for a while I’ve thought I should change my life.’

‘Congratulations.’

‘I knew you’d be delighted.’

‘Change it in what way?’

‘I’ll tell you later.’

‘Now I’m intrigued.’

‘Good.’ She said, ‘What’s really up with you?’

He shrugged. ‘I’m still happily bored.’

‘Depressed?’

‘A man who is tired of suffering is tired of life. But you won’t hear me complain.’

Five years ago Max sold his television company to a big media conglomerate. Having set it up during the time he was with Maggie to promote investigative journalism on television, he and his colleagues had made programmes about political and business corruption, ‘covering shadiness of all shades’. Later, after the company made a satirical political comedy series which achieved big ratings, they made other clever funnies. As he became more of an executive than artist, he sold the company well at a good time. For a while he’d loved having his pockets full of money, buying whatever he wanted, shopping with the kids. Apart from watching football, it was the thing they most liked doing as a family.

He’d done little paying work since, but had ‘run the house’ and attended to the children while his wife established herself as a producer. ‘I’m a feminist house-husband,’ he liked to boast. ‘All I do is support women, and has the sisterhood been grateful?’

‘Right-ho!’ he said now. He and Maggie touched glasses and downed the grappa.

‘Do you always drink at this time?’

‘Marta seems to think so.’

As they left the house, Maggie asked to see the rooms where he worked, smiling when she saw the birchwood ladder-backed chair Joe had restored as a present for Max when they first met.

She reached into her bag and said, ‘Joe sent this.’ It was a flat wooden paperknife decorated with carved symbols.

‘It’s lovely, thanks,’ he said, putting it on his desk. ‘I must find something to give him too.’

He pointed at the long white wall, against which leaned numerous frames covered in brown paper. ‘Like everyone else, I’ve begun to collect art and photographs,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t until recently that materialism made any sense to me. Now I think, this is
mine
, mine, and I’ve earned it.’

He and Maggie strolled up the road to where his new black Volkswagen convertible was parked. The restaurant was ten minutes’ walk away but Max was keen to show off the car.

He regarded her: like him, she was in her mid-fifties, and usually wore walking or what he considered ‘climbing’ and wet-weather clothes, with boots. She spent more time outside than him, and was tanned and lined, with greying hair that she might have cut herself, and no make-up. In his view, with this Patti Smith look, she appeared older than him now, but as Lucy said, if you think someone your age seems worn out, take it for granted you look twice as bad.

She said, ‘My God, it’s so wealthy here. But the foreigners I’ve noticed – they’re all employees and cheap labour, aren’t they?’

‘At this time of day they would be,’ he said. ‘Nannies, au pairs, cleaners, builders. What did you expect? Amazing to think, Maggie, of how London’s cleaned up since we were students. Can you remember how filthy it was then, graffiti, squats, and the tube an even more filthy pit than now, and no one paying for anything?’

‘Today it’s all control,’ she said.

‘It would be pretty to think so. But my kids are nervous on the street. Up the road there’s an estate where the wild boys see us as rich pickings.’

‘Only the very obedient survive, isn’t that right?’

‘How is it where you are?’

She and Joe still lived in a village in Somerset. When the commune had failed, they’d moved into a low-rent collapsing cottage which they had renovated.

‘You wouldn’t believe the poverty down there. It’s another country, which means it’s dull, and my work is repetitive, mostly with old women,’ she said. ‘That’s part of what I want to talk about.’

They sat in the car and Max put on a Clash CD. ‘Did we ever see them?’ he asked as ‘London Calling’ started. ‘I’m not sure we did, though we saw most of the other bands then.’ He went on, ‘Now, when I think about it, what a little paradise it was when we were together. The Health Service, unemployment benefit, cheap housing, the BBC, subsidised theatre. Mum and Dad didn’t pay a penny for my education, and if you came from a respectable but ordinary background, you believed you could get out and live differently to your parents. All that went when Thatcher came to power.’

For years he and Maggie were ‘political’ all the time; even their record collection had aided the revolution. He was proud of the anti-racist work they did, and the street stand-offs with the National Front. Much of the rest of their life together puzzled him, and he had begun to think it might be important to discuss it with Maggie later, after a few more drinks. She was argumentative, but he had begun to enjoy disputing, if not goading her, and liked to believe he was less scared of her than before.

‘That reminds me,’ he said, as the roof of the car slid open and the sound boomed into the street. ‘I didn’t show you the pictures of me receiving my OBE from the Queen.’

She was laughing. ‘I can’t wait.’

‘Naturally the medal wasn’t for me, but for the work everyone did for the company. I have a picture you can put on the mantelpiece. Joe will enjoy it.’

‘You’re going to be in a provocative mood today.’

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘But how can you not be fascinated by this funny little country? You go inside Buckingham Palace and there are Beefeaters, Chelsea Pensioners, Gurkhas, men in silver armour standing completely still, with like, you know, fur piled on their heads. There are other men walking across the Palace carpets wearing spurs on their shiny boots, a host of queens, and everyone else in badly fitting borrowed or hired suits. It’s like being sober at a fancy dress party.’

‘Do you really believe you’ve made a contribution?’

He said, ‘If you ever watch Spanish or Italian TV you’ll get some idea of the quality of what we do over here.’

‘I won’t have a TV in the house. Joe has to go to the pub to watch football.’

‘What is it, in your view, that people should be doing?’

‘Why can’t they talk?’

‘Watching the telly is more fun, I would have thought.’

Entering their usual restaurant in Hammersmith Grove, he said, ‘The service is terrible here, particularly since the Poles have sensed the downturn and have started to desert. But there’s no rush is there?’

As it was warm, they could sit outside, separated from the public by a neat hedge. The place was rarely crowded at lunchtime: there were only a few businessmen, a table of women who looked like footballers’ wives, and a couple of media executives who Max nodded at.

After they sat down she said, ‘I want to leave my job and home and come down here to live. Obviously I’ve got no money, but I’ll get a job.’

‘It’s too expensive, Maggie,’ he said, studying the menu. ‘
We’re
only just ahead. Four kids at private school – can you imagine? And capitalism’s having a breakdown, as Marx told us it would, every few years. Not a good time at all to try anything new, thank God. Can I order the wine?’

‘Max, I can’t wait for capitalism to sort itself out. You know how stubborn and bloody-minded I am – it’s one of those things I have to do.’

He asked, ‘Are you leaving Joe? Is that what it is?’

‘Neither of us is seeing anyone at the moment, but you know we don’t make a big deal about sharing. We can’t be everything to each other.’

‘I’ve been wondering about that,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘It’s such a peculiar and difficult thing.’

Joe had become part of their circle after they’d left university. A tall, long-bearded, lefty ex-public schoolboy with eyes which appealed to girls, he had started out as a furniture restorer to the rich, but wanted to be an honest worker, doing useful everyday toil. People liked to say his hands spoke for him, which Max considered to be a mercy, for otherwise he was almost completely silent. He would visit the flat Max and Maggie shared, and would smile, nod and shake his head, but rarely open his mouth. Later, when Max and Maggie split up and she began to go out with Joe, she would warn her friends that he’d say nothing. More annoyingly, because of Joe’s imperturbable silence, great wisdom was often attributed to him, as well as virtue: he was a committed activist. If you were poor and needed someone to work on your house for more or less nothing, he’d be there. Because he hated money and ‘breadheads’, if you wanted to pay him, better give him something useful, a bicycle, some potatoes, weed, a piano that needed mending.