Enduring Love (20 page)

Elsewhere there were portentous invocations of God’s darker side. “God’s love,” he wrote, “may take the form of wrath. It can show itself to us as calamity. This is the difficult lesson it’s taken me a lifetime to learn.” And related to this: “His love isn’t always gentle. How can it be when it has to last, when you can never shake it off? It’s a warmth, it’s a heat, and it can burn you, Joe, it can consume you.”

There were very few biblical references in Parry’s correspondence. His religion was dreamily vague on the specifics of doctrine, and he gave no impression of being attached to any particular church. His belief was a self-made affair, generally aligned to the culture of personal growth and fulfillment. There was a lot of talk of destiny, of his “path” and how he would not be deterred from following it, and of fate—his and mine entwined. Often, God was a term interchangeable with self. God’s love for mankind shaded into Parry’s love for
me. God was undeniably “within” rather than in his heaven, and believing in him was therefore a license to respond to the calls of feeling or intuition. It was the perfect loose structure for a disturbed mind. There were no constraints of theological nicety or religious observance, no social sanction or congregational calling to account, none of the moral framework that made religions viable, however failed their cosmologies. Parry listened only to the inner voice of his private God.

His one concession to a source beyond himself was a couple of references to the story of Job, and even here it was not obvious that he had read the primary material. “You looked uncomfortable,” he wrote once about seeing me in the street. “You even looked as though you might have been in pain, but that shouldn’t make you doubt us. Remember how much pain Job was in, and all the time God loved him.” Again, the unexamined assumption was that God and Parry were one, and between them they would settle the matter of our common fates. Another reference raised the possibility that I was God. “We’re both suffering, Joe, we’re both afflicted. The question is, which one of us is Job?”

When I left the flat in the late morning with a brown envelope containing my meticulously documented extracts, and with Clarissa’s present in my pocket, Parry was not there. I paused to look around, half expecting him to appear from behind one of his trees. The change in routine made me uneasy. I hadn’t seen him since the morning of the day before. Now that I had read the literature and knew the possibilities, I preferred him to be where I could see him. On my way to the police station I glanced back a few times to check if he was following me.

It was a quiet time of day, but I had to sit for over an hour in the waiting room. Where the human need for order meets the human tendency to mayhem, where civilization runs smack against its discontents,
you find friction, and a great deal of general wear and tear. It was there in the stringy holes in the lino on the threshold of each door, in the snaky vertical crack up the frosted glass behind the reception officer’s counter space, and in the hot, exhausted air that forced each visitor out of his jacket and each cop into shirtsleeves. It was in the slumped posture of two kids in bomber jackets who stared at their feet, too furious with each other to speak, and in the chiseled graffiti on the arm of the chair on which I sat: it was bland defiance or mounting anguish—
fuck fuck fuck
. And I saw it in the fluorescent pallor of Duty Inspector Linley’s large round face as he wearily showed me at last into an interview room. It looked as if he rarely went outdoors. He had no need when all the trouble filed through here.

A journalist friend who had served three years on the crime desk of a tabloid had advised me that the only way to get the police even faintly interested in my case was to make an official complaint about the way it had been handled so far. This way I could get past the woman in glasses who guarded the reception desk. The complaint would have to be dealt with, at least, and I could explain my problem to someone a little further up the station hierarchy. The same friend warned me not to expect too much. My man would be looking at retirement and wanting a quiet life. His brief was to suppress complaints while appearing to address them.

Linley waved me into one of two metal stacking chairs. We faced each other across a Formica table patterned in coffee rings. At every point on its surface my cold chair was greasy to the touch. The ashtray was the sawn-off butt of a plastic Coke bottle. Near it squatted a used tea bag on a spoon. The squalor in here was laconic in its challenge: who was I going to report it to?

I had submitted my complaint, Linley had eventually phoned me, and I had given him the story. At the time I had trouble deciding
whether he was slightly clever or very stupid. He had one of those strangulated voices with which comedians sometimes characterize officialdom. Linley’s had suggested a degree of imbecility. On the other hand, he hadn’t said much. Even now, as he opened the file, no good morning or where were we or hum and hah. Just the electronic whistle of breath through nasal hair. Into such silences, I guessed, suspects and witnesses said more than they intended, so I kept quiet too as I watched him turn the couple of pages of his slanting spiky handwriting in which he had recorded his notes.

Linley raised his eyes, but he didn’t look at me. He was staring into my chest. It was only when he drew breath to speak that the focus of his tiny gray eyes brushed past mine. “So. You’re being harassed and threatened by this character. You’ve reported it, and got no satisfaction.”

“That’s it,” I said.

“The harassment consists of …?”

“As I told you before,” I said, trying to read his writing upside down. Had he not been listening to me? “He sends three or four letters a week.”

“Obscenities?”

“No.”

“Lewd suggestions?”

“No.”

“Insults?”

“Not really.”

“Sexual sort of things, then.”

“It doesn’t seem to be about sex. It’s an obsession. He’s completely fixated on me. He doesn’t think about anything else.”

“Does he phone you?”

“Not anymore. It’s just the letters.”

“He’s in love with you.”

I said, “He’s suffering from a condition known as de Clerambault’s syndrome. It’s a delusional state. He thinks I started it, he’s convinced I’m encouraging him with secret signals—”

“Are you a psychiatrist, Mr. Rose?”

“No.”

“But you are a homosexual.”

“No.”

“How did you meet?”

“I’ve already told you. The ballooning accident.”

He twitched a page of his notes. “I don’t seem to have a record of that.”

I gave him a brief account while he rested his heavy symmetrical head on his hands, still untempted to write the story down. When I had done, he said, “How did it start?”

“He phoned late that night.”

“He said he loved you and you hung up. You must have been upset.”

“Disturbed.”

“So you discussed it with your wife.”

“The next morning.”

“Why the delay?”

“We were very tired and stressed out from the accident.”

“And what’s her reaction to all this?”

“She’s upset. It’s put quite a strain on us.”

Linley looked away and made a show of pursing his lips. “Does she ever get angry with you about this business? Or you with her?”

“It’s put a lot of pressure on our relationship. We were very happy before.”

“Any history of psychiatric illness, Mr. Rose?”

“None at all.”

“Stress at work, that sort of thing?”

“Nothing like that.”

“Pretty tough business, journalism, isn’t it?”

I nodded. I was beginning to detest Linley and his curious globular face. I said into the pause that followed, “I’ve got good reasons to believe this guy will turn nasty. I came to the police for help.”

“Quite right,” said Linley. “I’d do the same myself. And it looks like the law on this sort of thing is about to be tightened up. So he stands outside the house and bothers you when you come out.”

“He used to. These days he just stands there. If I try to talk to him, he walks away.”

“So he’s not actually …” He trailed off and looked, or pretended to look, through his notes. He was muttering to himself. “That’s the harassment, um …” Then to me, brightly, “Now what about the threats?”

“I’ve copied out some passages. They’re not right out front. You’ll need to read carefully.”

Duty Inspector Linley settled back to read, and while his gaze was lowered I stared at his face. It wasn’t the pallor that was repellent, it was the puffy, inhuman geometry of its roundness. A near-perfect circle was centered on his button nose and encompassed the white dome of his baldness and the curve of his fattened chin. This circle was inscribed on the surface of a barely misshapen sphere. His forehead bulged, his cheeks rolled out tightly from below his little gray eyes, and the curve was picked up again in the bluish undimpled bulge between his nose and his upper lip.

He dropped my pages onto the desk, clasped his hands behind his head, and contemplated the ceiling for a few seconds, then looked at me with a hint of pity. “As stalkers go, Mr. Rose, he’s a pussycat. What do you want us to do? Arrest him?”

I said, “You’ve got to understand the intensity of this delusion
and the frustration that’s building up. He needs to know he can’t just do anything—”

“There’s nothing here that’s threatening, abusive, or insulting as defined by Section Five of the Public Order Act.” Linley was talking faster. He wanted me out of there. “Nothing in the Offenses Against the Person Act of 1861. We couldn’t even caution him. He loves his God, he loves you, and I’m sorry about that, but he hasn’t broken the law.” He picked up the extracts and let them drop. “I mean, where’s the threat, exactly?”

“If you read carefully and think logically, you’ll see he’s implying that he can get someone, hire someone, to beat me up.”

“Too weak. You should see what we get in here. He hasn’t trashed your car, has he, or waved a knife at you, or tipped the dustbin over your front path. He hasn’t even sworn at you. I mean, have you and your wife considered asking him in for a cup of tea and a chat?”

I was doing well to keep so calm, I thought. “Look, he’s a classic case. De Clerambault’s, erotomania, stalking, call it what you want. I’ve gone into it in some depth. The literature shows that when he realizes that he’s not going to get what he wants, there’s a real danger of violence. You could at least send a couple of officers round to his place and let him know he’s on your books.”

Linley stood, but I remained obstinately sitting. He had his hand on the doorknob. His show of patience was a form of mockery. “In the kind of society we have, or want to have, not to mention our limited manpower, we can’t send officers to Citizen A on account of Citizen B reading a few books and deciding there’s violence in the air. Nor can my men be in two places at once, watching him, protecting you.”

I was about to answer, but Linley opened the door and stepped
out. He spoke to me from the corridor. “But I’ll tell you what I will do. I’ll send our home beat officer to your house sometime in the coming week. He’s got ten years’ experience in community problems, and I’m sure he’ll be able to make some useful suggestions.” Then he was gone and I heard him in the waiting room, saying in a loud voice, presumably to the lads in bomber jackets, “Complaint? You two? What a joke! Listen to me. You both kindly fuck off now and I just might see my way to losing that file.”

I was late for lunch and I walked quickly up the street, away from the station, glancing over my shoulder for a taxi. I should have been angry or alarmed, but somehow the brush-off from Linley was clarifying. I had made two attempts to get the police interested. I needn’t bother again. Perhaps it was the weight of Clarissa’s present in my pocket that brought my thoughts to her instead, and all our unhappiness. I couldn’t quite take seriously her insistence that we were finished. It had always seemed to me that our love was just the kind to endure. Now, hurrying along the Harrow Road, prompted also by a phrase Inspector Linley had used, I found myself remembering her last birthday, when we had celebrated without a trace of complication in our lives.

The phrase was “in two places at once,” and the memory was of early morning. I left her sleeping and went to make the tea. I probably gathered up the mail from the hallway floor and sorted the birthday cards from the rest and put them on a tray. While I was waiting for the kettle, I looked at a radio talk I was going to record that afternoon. I remember it well because I used the material later for the first chapter of a book. Might there be a genetic basis to religious belief, or was it merely refreshing to think so? If faith conferred selective advantage, there were any number of possible means, and nothing could be proven. Suppose religion gave status, especially to
its priest caste? Plenty of social advantage in that. What if it bestowed strength in adversity, the power of consolation, the chance of surviving the disaster that might crush a godless man? Perhaps it gave believers passionate conviction, the brute strength of singlemindedness.

Possibly it worked on groups as well as on individuals, bringing cohesion and identity and a sense that you and your fellows were right, even—or especially—when you were wrong. With God on our side. Uplifted by a crazed unity, armed with horrible certainty, you descend on the neighboring tribe, beat and rape it senseless, and come away burning with righteousness and drunk with the very victory your gods had promised. Repeat fifty thousand times over the millennia, and the complex set of genes controlling for groundless conviction could get a strong distribution. I floated in and out of these preoccupations. The kettle boiled and I made the tea.

The night before, Clarissa had braided her hair into a single plait, which she had secured with a strip of black velvet. When I came in with the tea and birthday cards and morning paper, she was sitting up in bed, loosening her hair and shaking it out. Being in bed with your lover is a fine thing, but returning to her in its night-long warmth is sweet. I toasted her in tea, we read the cards and set about the birthday cuddle. Clarissa weighs eighty pounds less than me, and she sometimes likes to start out on top. She gathered the bedclothes around her like a bridal train and sat sleepily astride me. On this particular morning we had a game going. I lay on my back pretending to read the newspaper. While she drew me in and sighed and wriggled and shivered, I made a show of being unaware of her, of turning the pages and frowning at the piece before me. It gave her a little masochistic thrill to feel she was ignored; she wasn’t noticed, she wasn’t there. Annihilation! Then she took a controlling pleasure in
destroying my attention, drawing me from the frantic public realm into the deep world that was entirely herself. Now I was the one who was to be obliterated, and along with me, everything that was not her.